Goshwowboyoboy

(Did you mean the Gary Farber fanzine or the Robert Schoenfeld fanzine?)

Goshwowboyoboy stands for ebullient fannish enthusiasm.

An example of a pejorative term that fandom has made its own, it was seized upon by an uncredited Time magazine news reporter disdainfully covering the First Worldcon, who presented that in its July 10, 1939 issue as typical of fan correspondence, to the indignation of many.

Later, Martin Alger found the original loc in the lettercol of the August 1939 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. The letter, from Neil A. Lafferty, Jr., of Brooklyn began:

Gosh! Wow! Boyohboy!, and so forth and so on. Yesiree, yesiree, it’s the greatest in the land and the best that’s on the stand, and I do mean THRILLING WONDER STORIES, and especially that great, magnificent, glorious, most thrilling June issue of the mosta and besta of science fiction magazines. 

In The Enchanted Duplicator, while the City Planner of Serious Constructivism expounds to Mr. Press on the glories of the City, Jophan looks at the reporter’s notebook.

The page was perfectly blank except for one cryptic sentence which Jophan could not understand. He only knew that it bore no relationship whatever to what Dedwood had been saying. It read, simply, “Gosh-wow-oh-boy-oh-boy!”

Fandom now uses the term, often abbreviated as just goshwow, to describe an enthusiastic or, perhaps, over-enthusiastic approach to science fiction or fandom. While the term implies a certain geekiness and is often applied to neofen, it is usually used kindly.

From Fancyclopedia 2, ca. 1959

Symbol of the type of reader who made Time magazine call us the jitterbugs of the pulp magazine field in its article on the NYCon. The expression led off an allegedly typical letter they quoted, commenting on TWS; indignant fans held it to be an invention of the reporter who wrote up the NYCon, for a long time. Martin Alger finally tracked it down in "The Reader Speaks", TWS' letter column, for August 1939.

From Fancyclopedia 1, ca. 1944

(Time) - Symbol of the type of reader who made Time magazine call us the jitterbugs of the pulp magazine field. The expression appears in an allegedly typical letter which they quoted, commenting on TWS; probably it was an invention of the reporter who wrote up the New York World Convention. It has become a gag line in fandom.

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Fanspeak

1939—

This is a fanspeak page. Please extend it by adding information about when and by whom it was coined, whether it’s still in use, etc.