Aww come on! Okay yeah, the more common ones annoy me too and I don't use them; but at the same time I love inventing new ones on my own.
Okay maybe that's how it started, but now it's very very definitely used as just a replacement for "fan".
A point Colin Baker made at Gallifrey One after the orange shitgibbon was elected.
I could write a lot about this topic, but I especially want to pick on "professionalism." I think the term is often misused to mean boot licking. Differentiating yourself from a doormat is often called "unprofessional." Closely related, management at my company always talks about the importance of being "positive," which I agree with, except a very common pitfall of senior management it to confuse "having a positive attitude" with just telling them what they want to hear.
I think the difference between "patriotism" and "nationalism" is subtle and often lost. I think what's really stunning is that many nationalists also believe it was Obama and his being nice to countries that made us a laughing stock.
Steven Colbert brilliantly coined the term "truthiness" to describe this perfectly. I think the word "truth" is very popular among people who are really good at lying to themselves:
In Persian and Urdu it means "place of" or "land of", as in Afghanistan - land of the Afghans. The Doumbek is a Middle-Eastern hand drum popular with drum circles. At large medieval camping events we used to assign those groups to a distant part of the camp, so it wouldn't bother the rest of the campers who were trying to sleep. We jokingly referred to their camping area as Doumbekistan.
I read somewhere that the modern understanding of the word "fan" is based on the Roman and Byzantine sporting factions. They could be incredibly violent and sometimes rioted and caused more deaths and property damage than modern football hooligans. It's probably nonsense but a nice thought.
