Gafiate

Pronounced /ˈɡæfɪeɪt/

Don’t bother to look this one up in your dictionary, as the chances are slim that you will find it. I was baffled by it when it turned up in David Langford’s science-fiction newsletter Ansible Link: “As fans die or gafiate ...” (that word ansible is another very interesting bit of specialist SF vocabulary).

Mr Langford tells me that it’s a well-known bit of SF fan slang, derived from the acronym GAFIA “Getting Away From It All” and that it was originally used in the sense of finding SF fans’ organisations (fandom) but soon changed to its opposite — leaving fandom. The noun and verb almost inevitably followed.

This is another example of its use:

“We heard you”d gafiated.” “Fafiated.” She looked him straight in the eye, daring him to disagree. She hadn’t gotten away from it all; she’d been forced away from it all.

Fallen Angels, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Michael Flynn, 1991.

The word may date back to the early days of SF fandom in the 1940s, or perhaps even the 1930s. However, the first written example quoted in Jeff Prucher’s The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction is this:

Westlake’s piece is so reminiscent of the old days of fandom, when no gafiate felt he had actually departed until he had alienated everybody on his mailing list.

From a letter in the Xero fan magazine (fanzine), dated 1962, quoted in The Best of Xero, by Pat Lupoff and Dick Lupoff, 2005.