On our Facebook group, a listener asks if anyone else’s children have been taught the term fanboy, meaning a coordinating conjunction. These connecting words include f or, a nd, n or, b ut, o r, y et, and s o, and a helpful way to remember them is with the acronym FANBOYS. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “FANBOYS Is a Mnemonic for Coordinating Conjunctions”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
I learned something from our listeners on our Facebook group the other day.
There was a post from Lisa Weingart who was talking about how she was helping her fourth-grade daughter editing her homework.
And she said that her daughter’s very clever teacher assigns a page of reading on a social studies topic,
And then they have a list of questions regarding grammatical errors, asking how to combine two shorter sentences in a compound sentence.
All right.
That kind of thing.
And so her daughter looks up to her and says, is or a fanboy?
And Lisa says, what’s a fanboy?
And her daughter says, fanboy is a word like and.
And her mom says, well, no, I think you’re talking about a conjunction.
And her daughter says, no, no, no, it’s a fanboy.
And they went back and forth and back and forth.
And I didn’t know what it was.
Lisa was asking for help to see what a fanboy was.
Did people know?
Well, I would say probably right now half of our listeners are shouting at the radio,
You don’t know what a fanboy is?
And half of them are like me going, what is a fanboy when you’re talking about grammar?
Because, of course, you and I know a fanboy to be somebody who’s really devoted to something, right?
Yeah, die hard.
No matter what, they’re always loyal.
Yeah, but it turns out that Lisa’s daughter was learning in school that FANBOYS is an acronym for all the conjunctions in the English language, the seven conjunctions.
For, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so.
FANBOYS.
FANBOYS, right.
Yeah, and so they were having this discussion, and her daughter was trying to explain it to her.
And Lisa said that eventually her daughter ran to her room, grabbed some pom-poms, and did the fanboy cheer she learned in school.
Would you like to hear it?
Yes, I do want to hear it.
Fanboys, fanboys are the glue between sentence one and sentence two.
You have to picture me with pom-poms.
Sure, yeah.
Fanboys, fanboys.
Flirty skirt, the whole thing, yeah.
Flirty skirt.
But what was so funny was that I would say fully half of us on the Facebook group didn’t know.
I’ve never heard that mnemonic device.
No, I never have heard that mnemonic.
But then all these other people were saying, of course, fanboys.
Different teaching cultures maybe, right?
We are a very large country.
There are many ways to do this.
We’d love for you to share your favorite mnemonic with us or tell us your stories about language.
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