"slang" and "informal" as dict labels

[Mark A Mandel]

On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Laurence Horn wrote:

#If I'm right, it depends on what "called" means.  As I mentioned, my
#sense is that it's ok to refer to it that way in print, but that
#nobody actually says "SF" colloquially; it's like "NY" for New York
#or "SD" for San Diego in this respect, rather than "LA" or "KC".  I
#could be wrong, though.

At the fannish events I've attended -- every Arisia and Boskone since
about 1993 (the major New England cons, with regularly ca. 2000+ and
1000+ attendees), several filk cons (filk is the music of fandom; see
URL below for pointers to definitions, discussions, and examples), and
monthly housefilks -- /'Es'Ef/ is a normal way of referring to science
fiction, often though not always distinguished from fantasy. My
daughter, who is (check clock) now returning from a conference in
Albuquerque, where she read a paper, is adamant that "sf" stands for
"speculative fiction", which includes both of those and more -- or at
least that was the case last time we discussed it. However, she's in the
literary / critical population, and we all know that hoi polloi misuse
words like "dialect" and "slang" that the specialists have precise
definitions of... don't we? ;-)

-- Mark A. Mandel, The Filker With No Nickname
     http://world.std.com/~mam/filk.html
     Now on the Filker's Bardic Webring!