[Ads-l] ship, v. (2000-01)

[Ben Zimmer]

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 12:07 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> If "ship" and "shippers" were never used in relation to the Cybill
> Shepherd and Bruce Willis characters on Moonlighting in the 1980s (same
> issues of will-they-or-won't-they-and-why-don't-they-just-get-on-with-it
> as in the X files), that would place a bound on the point in time before
> which these terms of art didn't exist.  I'm pretty sure the terms didn't
> exist, even if the context did, for speculations about Captain Kirk and Mr.
> Spock in the original Star Wars series...
>

There was a different term for Kirk/Spock speculations -- "slash" (after
the slash mark between their names). "Slash fiction" lives on for similar
same-sex pairings of fictional characters, as I discussed in my WSJ column
on "shipping."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/as-the-x-files-returns-so-do-shippers-1454098144

--bgz

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org