What does 'Fem!' mean?

[Sean Hollyman]

Like I know that people use it when referring to a female version of a character, but what purpose does the exclamation mark serve? It always bugged me

 

[mistahzig1]

That's the only thing I could find:

https://ca.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101121114834AAay9Rj

 

[Queen Michael]

The exclamation mark is usually placed between the name of a character and any fan-additions to the name.

Like Fem!Naruto, Young!Snape, and so on.

 

[Tamayo]

Using the exclamation mark as a binary operator derives (I am fairly sure) from the now mostly-superseded computer language Miranda, wherein a!n meant the n-th element of the list a. For a time, Miranda was fairly influential in programming language design circles, so other languages picked up the general pattern; Haskell and D come to mind immediately, though they use it for different syntactic purposes.

 

[DefunctTheory]

Using the exclamation mark as a binary operator derives (I am fairly sure) from the now mostly-superseded computer language Miranda, wherein a!n meant the n-th element of the list a. For a time, Miranda was fairly influential in programming language design circles, so other languages picked up the general pattern; Haskell and D come to mind immediately, though they use it for different syntactic purposes.

It's either that, or the fact that / is usually reserved for something very different (And often times disturbing) in the same circles that use the Fem! 'modifier.'

 

[Basement Cat]

I saw the title and did some SERIOUS WIKIPEDIA RESEARCH!!!

Spoiler: It was serious business! Vry srs!!!

And here is THE ANSWER!!!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_emission_microscopy

 

[Tayh]

I thought it was just that some people don't know the dash exists (fem-shep), or realise that you can combine the two words with no issue (femshep).

 

[TheRiddler]

It's a fanfic thing. It isn't really limited to the "Fem!" thing though. Basically, if you want to alert the reader that a character is going to be markedly different from their appearance in canon, then you attach a modifier.

As for the exclamation marks, I assume they're there so that you can string multiple modifiers on one character. Y'know, like "Angsty!Evil!Dumbledore". Why exclamation marks? I don't know, but I'd guess that it's to alert readers to continuity changes in the fanfic.

 

[trlkly]

Using the exclamation mark as a binary operator derives (I am fairly sure) from the now mostly-superseded computer language Miranda, wherein a!n meant the n-th element of the list a. For a time, Miranda was fairly influential in programming language design circles, so other languages picked up the general pattern; Haskell and D come to mind immediately, though they use it for different syntactic purposes.

It's either that, or the fact that / is usually reserved for something very different (And often times disturbing) in the same circles that use the Fem! 'modifier.'

That still doesn't explain not using -, which would be the grammatical answer (whether dash or hyphen), or some other programming construct such as _ or . or CamelCase. At least those symbols would look like variations of natural English.

 

[Kristopherw]

I always thought the ! was a wildcard character in searches. As an example if you were searching for fan fictions with a certain female version of a character then you'd type in "fem!(character name)" and it would show results for "fem!(character name)", "fem(character name)" and "fem (character name)" and other combinations that are similar. Of course it's completely possible that this explanation is wrong but it seems plausible to me.

 

[Tamayo]

Hm, it occurs to me that there's another important instance of infix exclamations: bang paths.

Way back at the beginning of time before people invented domain name servers and automatic routing, email and public messaging was [em]really complicated[/em]---by which I mean if Alice had a message she wanted to send to Bob far away, she had to know exactly how the message was going to get there. If Alice's computer was named foo, and Bob's was fnarply, and the intended path between foo and fnarply went through servers bar, baz, quux, blarg, and gronk, then the message was actually routed as alice@foo!bar!baz!quux!blarg!gronk!fnarply.

Now, it's fairly apparent that the infix exclamation in the language of bang paths is left-associative and anti-commutative. Those syntactic attributes are retained in the infix exclamation of the

entity ::= basic-entity | attribute "!" entity

grammar productions, such as Fem!Shep. As an example, the construction Redhead!Fem!Shep actually works.

 

[Lieju]

[

It's either that, or the fact that / is usually reserved for something very different (And often times disturbing) in the same circles that use the Fem! 'modifier.'

Also some websites will think anything with a / in them is a web-address, and might block it as spam or remove it.

 

[Syntax Error]

It's used when referring to a character who appears in the same work but in different forms of himself. In your example, Fem!Shep denotes Shepard, but Female. Sure, there might be better and easier way to denote this, but internet people like to be dramatic.

 

[AnarchistFish]

Using the exclamation mark as a binary operator derives (I am fairly sure) from the now mostly-superseded computer language Miranda, wherein a!n meant the n-th element of the list a. For a time, Miranda was fairly influential in programming language design circles, so other languages picked up the general pattern; Haskell and D come to mind immediately, though they use it for different syntactic purposes.

It's either that, or the fact that / is usually reserved for something very different (And often times disturbing) in the same circles that use the Fem! 'modifier.'

What is / used for?

 

[Samantha Burt]

I always thought the ! was a wildcard character in searches. As an example if you were searching for fan fictions with a certain female version of a character then you'd type in "fem!(character name)" and it would show results for "fem!(character name)", "fem(character name)" and "fem (character name)" and other combinations that are similar. Of course it's completely possible that this explanation is wrong but it seems plausible to me.

Firstly, welcome to the forums.

Secondly, this seems like the most reasonable suggestion, otherwise you could just use a hyphen or whatever, as suggested by others.

 

[DoPo]

Using the exclamation mark as a binary operator derives (I am fairly sure) from the now mostly-superseded computer language Miranda, wherein a!n meant the n-th element of the list a. For a time, Miranda was fairly influential in programming language design circles, so other languages picked up the general pattern; Haskell and D come to mind immediately, though they use it for different syntactic purposes.

It's either that, or the fact that / is usually reserved for something very different (And often times disturbing) in the same circles that use the Fem! 'modifier.'

What is / used for?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_fiction

You are welcome.

It's basically porn fanfic with the slash separateing the names of the characters who are in it.

 

[erbkaiser]

It acts as a modifier to the canon character, such as Fem!Naruto = female Naruto.
Hero!Snape = Snape is a hero.
Bi!Harry = Harry is bisexual.
Etc.

/ is used for pairings, so Percy/Annabeth implies those two will get it on some time in the story.

 

[Mangod]

Well, "FEM!" could also literally mean that someone's screaming the Swedish word for five.