What Exactly Is A “Fan” Anyway?
Can anyone help me understand?
I’ve always been a word nerd. Back when I was in elementary school, a favorite assignment of my teachers used to be to have us illustrate the different meanings homonyms, words that sounded the same but had different meanings. My classmates would roll their eyes and grumble, but I was always secretly delighted. All these years later, I still find thinking about words and multiple meanings fascinating.
Most recently, I have been fixating on the word “fan”. It’s diverse in it’s usage and has multiple meanings.
A fan can be a verb, as in blowing air and also a noun, as in a device to create the movement of air.
A second definition of fan is an admirer or an enthusiastic devotee. These two meanings are so different and seem like a disconnect. Yet that’s part of my fascination as a word nerd.
I’m a relative newbie here on Medium and I’ve been trying to understand the word “fan” in this context. At first glance, it seems obvious- meaning number two, an admirer. Medium looks at the number of individual people who clapped for a story and labels those readers as your fans. It seems simple enough.
I quickly learned though, that everyone has their own system for clapping. Some readers give the maximum, fifty claps, for…
