Bart Ender

oh great pukicho there is a rumor going around on the corner of pinterest filled with tumblr screenshots, that you are transfem. i was to this point referring to you as she/her, but i see your blog description says ‘male’. we’re the pinterest folk misinformed? (i’m genuinely confused this is an actual question)

I just really hate the word "fandom". It's just a portmanteau of "fan" and "random". It sounds like some desperate attempt to be quirky and different. Plus, the word "fanbase" already exists.

Actually, Anon, fandom is significantly older than fan base or fanbase; the OED gives the first known citation of fandom meaning “the community of fans of a thing” from 1903, while their first entry for fan base isn’t until the 1970s. If you compare the frequencies of the two terms in Google Ngram Viewer, you’ll see that fandom has historically been far more frequent, with fan base running a distant second (and the closed form fanbase an even more distant third).

So, seeing as the OED does not provide free access to its sources, I looked this up. According to various webpages, included this one, ‘fandom’ was used in 1903 by the Cincinnati Enquirer to refer to baseball fans.

As someone who reads a lot of old newspapers - I have to correct the OED as “fandom” was in wide use by the 1890s.