Shipping characters in fiction in ways the original author didn’t intend — picturing them in new non-canon relationships — goes back at least as far as so-called slash fiction or slashfic, a type of fan fiction involving same-sex romantic or sexual relationships between fictional characters. In the 1990s and possibly earlier, for example, Star Trek fanzines featured K/S slash fiction imagining Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk as a couple. Discussion of shipping, shippers, and ships — short for relationshipping, relationshipper, and relationships — started in the 1990s with The X-Files, the TV series featuring Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, an attractive pair fans fervently hoped would explore each other’s Area 51. This is part of a complete episode.
If you start the phrase when in Rome… but don’t finish the sentence with do as the Romans do, or say birds of a feather… without adding flock together, you’re engaging in anapodoton, a term of rhetoric that refers to the...
There are many proposed origins for the exclamation of surprise, holy Toledo! But the most likely one involves not the city in Ohio, but instead Toledo, Spain, which has been a major religious center for centuries in the traditions of both Islam and...
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