Word of the day – fan

I was talking to my Spanish friend the other day and  for some reason used the word fan, and even as I explained it to her, the number of uses of this tiny word seemed disproportionate to its length. To fan as a verb, I said to wave something to make a draft, and I waved my hand in front of my face…. or a ceiling fan, conjuring images of hotels in the tropics with a lazy fan rotating gently… or a fan such as a Spanish dancer might use, or a Spanish person when it is hot, beautiful, delicate Spanish fans, which can be used for so much more than keeping cool. Apparently there is, or was, a whole signalling system using a fan, denoting status, single or married, desire or emotion… I think I’d get confused and send the wrong message! Fans have ceremonial and martial use in China too, or they did in the days of the Empire.

Have a look at this interesting site which tells you that fans have been in use for thousands of years:

http://www.idealspain.com/pages/information/fans_in_spain.html

The shape of a handheld fan has attached the word to other things, a fantailed bird for example, an alluvial fan – a geological deposit of sediment, a sea fan –  a sea creature, fan as used in geometry… and then the places named fan in Albania, in China, in Richmond Virginia. Fan is also a Chinese name and a Chinese character 范

A whole different meaning of the word is as an abbreviation of the word ‘fanatic’ to become the much more benign sounding ‘fan’, leading to fan mail, fan club, fanzine and so on!

The word fan, it may not surprise you to learn comes from Old English ‘fann’, meaning a winnowing thing, which in turn is derived from the Latin ‘vannus’ meaning the same, which stretches back to a word in the earliest Proto-Indo-European language, ‘we’.

And then of course there is the well-known saying about the **** hitting the fan…