"'Ruth Bader Ginsburg' was trending on Twitter Sunday night, and liberals across the Internet panicked."

"'My heart stopped for a moment,' tweeted writer Wajahat Ali. Dedicated RBG fans feared the worst. They refused to look up the news. They prayed. They offered their kidneys. 'I was on my way to the hospital to donate all my organs,' wrote another fan. 'Please be alive, please be alive, please be alive …,' tweeted another."

So begins the WaPo article "Ruth Bader Ginsburg says she has ‘at least 5 more years’ on the Supreme Court. Her fans rejoice."

By the way, should a Supreme Court Justice have "fans"? Or perhaps a better way of putting it: Is it a compliment to a Supreme Court Justice to speak of her having "fans"?

I've been reading Bill Bryson's "Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States":

Fans in the sense of enthusiasts is presumed to be a shortening of fanatics, but the conclusion is only speculative. Mencken suggests that it may come from fancy, as in to fancy someone’s chances. In the early days [of baseball] supporters weren’t called fans but cranks, presumably because they cranked up the home team with their cheering.

I'm enjoying this book but I don't trust any of the assertions in it. I think that's interesting, but then I check. For example, I was just writing about baby boomers in the previous post, and it made me remember that Bryson said the term "baby boom" wasn't coined "until 1978, in an article in the New Yorker." But it's very easy to look up "baby boom" in the OED and see "baby boom" was used as far back as 1880 (and obviously not just for the post-WWII baby boom (in 1880, it was "the Iowa baby boom")). In 1941, Life Magazine had "Whatever the reasons, the U.S. baby boom is bad news for Hitler." Referring to the people born in a baby boom as "baby boomers" is newer, but it was around in 1963:

1963 Salt Lake Tribune 8 Dec. 83 Statistics show that..long hours of television viewing put an extra strain on chairs, causing upholstered seating pieces to wear out three to four times faster than in the days before television and the baby-boomers.

So what about "fans"? Putting aside a couple strange things in the 1600s, "fan" to refer to enthusiastic spectators, did originate with respect to baseball (as early as 1889), and the OED gives no regard to Mencken's theory but says it's a shortening of "fanatic" — that is, a crazy, delusional, unrealistically enthusiastic person.

As for "crank," the OED has this definition (in an entry that begins with "crank" as a bend in a path or a winding path:

colloq. (orig. U.S.). A person with a mental twist; one who is apt to take up eccentric notions or impracticable projects; esp. one who is enthusiastically possessed by a particular crotchet or hobby; an eccentric, a monomaniac. [This is probably a back-formation < cranky adj.1 4.] 

IN THE COMMENTS: Referring to the previous post, dda6ga dda6ga says:

Combine two postings; does the notorious RBG like to be called Grandma?

Sharp question. I love when commenters connect to other posts. And I know the answer to the question: Bubbe.

And here's an article from The Forward, "The Battle Over What To Call Your Grandma":

[S]adly, outside the ultra-Orthodox community fewer Jewish women want their grandchildren to call them bubbe, claiming it’s too Old World. Perhaps, though, the real reason is that bubbe is simply too Jewish. So now some grandmothers are choosing the Israeli word, “savta,” whereas others simply resort to English-language monikers.

It seems the term bubbe has taken on negative connotations, similar to many other terms related to Jewish women, as in the classic “Jewish mother” or “mother-in-law.” The B-word is seen as a vestige of a previous era, causing modern, educated women to run the other way....

Negative associations with “bubbe” appear even in classic Yiddish literature and folklore. In Abraham Goldfaden’s famous operetta, “The Witch,” the sorceress herself is called Bubbe Yakhne. Morris Warshawsky’s song, “Di Mezinke Oysgegebn” [“Marrying Off My Youngest Daughter”], describes the many lively scenes at a wedding, including one verse where “Bubbe does the kazatsky” — an image that’s apparently meant to evoke laughter, since grandmothers are expected to sit quietly and with dignity, rather than to clown around and dance “like the men.”...

A Jewish grandmother can — like me — be a Barnard grad, an editor and even something of a boxer, yet at the same time instill in her grandchildren the importance of Jewish memory. No word captures this vital role better than bubbe.

ADDED: Why did RBG choose 5 years as the length of time she sees herself serving? That would only get her to 2023, a point in the next presidential term that gives the winner of the 2020 election the power to appoint her successor.

First, it's a milestone year for her. She'll be 90. But she's not promising to step down upon turning 90, because she said "at least 5 years."

If we see her statement as political — and not simply about round numbers — there are 2 reasons to put her prediction in the form that she did. She's accustoming us to the idea of a Justice properly serving when she is in her 90s, in case Trump is reelected and she must hang on until 2024. But she's also implicitly stressing the importance of defeating Trump in 2020. She's found a subtle clever way to say I can last another term and I can't last another term. Both statements are important politically, but said plainly, they contradict. And a Supreme Court Justice shouldn't speak plainly when speaking plainly makes political motivation plain.