If the tea’s gone cold and you’re wondering why, or if Eminem just hasn’t responded to your fan letters yet, it could be because the word “stan” is still being inexplicably accepted as a normal thing for people to say even though it comes from a song about a guy who kills himself and his pregnant girlfriend. In 2017, we reported that “stan” had been added to the Oxford American Dictionary (though it was technically just the online version and it had apparently already been there for a while) as a reference to “an overzealous or obsessive fan,” and now Oxford’s hated competitors at Merriam-Webster have actually added “stan” to that dictionary (or at least the dictionary’s website), with a press release explaining that it refers to an “extremely devoted fan” and the actual entry referencing the Eminem song—but, again, not the fact that Eminem’s Stan kills himself and his pregnant girlfriend because Eminem won’t answer his letters.
“Stan” is just one of 640 new words that have been added to Merriam-Webster.com, with others including “buzzy” (for “generating buzz”), “garbage time” (as in the last few meaningless minutes of a sports match), and “swole” (for beefy muscle-people). There are also a few more words that will be familiar to fans of pop culture, like “peak,” “bottle episode,” “EGOT,” “on-brand,” and “snowflake,” as in: “It’s on-brand for Trump stans to complain that we’re at peak snowflake in this cheap bottle episode of a TV show, but they still won’t get the EGOT.” You can see more of the new words at Merriam-Webster’s website.