You may be a fan of Keanu Reeves, but what if you really, really love Keanu and can’t stop looking at the “Keanu Doing Things” account on Twitter, and don’t know how you will while away the time until John Wick 3? Maybe you are more than a fan – you are a “stan”.
This tasty bit of celeb-culture slang was mentioned in an article this week about the bullying and often misogynistic side of pop fandom, but it is already 18 years old. Owing to rhetorical inflation driven by overuse of the word “fan” (originally short for “fanatic”), we came to need a new word for particularly obsessive fanning. “Stan” boasts a retroactively imposed etymology (appropriately, “stalker” plus “fan”), but it was originally taken from the 2000 Eminem song of the same name about a deranged admirer of the narrator’s.
It’s OK to call oneself a “stan”, though, because such usage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “self-deprecating”. Enjoyably, “stan” can also be a verb (“I stan Keanu”), and the only potential drawback this column can see is the unfortunate effect on other artists actually named Stan, eg Stan Lee, or Stan Ridgway. Can you stan Stan?
