rick2 said:
What word do they use in German?
There are two answers to that:
1) our language has mostly stopped progressing since Hollywood became cool many decades ago. So our word would be "Fanboy" lol
2) you could replace it with a more uncommon pluralistic term like Fanatiker (fanatics) where Fanatiker used to be gender neutral if the group referred to included both genders (like fanaticos in Spanish). If it was only female fanatics it would have been Fanatikerinnen (like fanaticas in Spanish). However, very recent reforms have introduced to so-called "gender-star" and now the correct term is Fanatiker*innen. Not kidding - it's actually a HUGE part of the campaigning of the national election in September.
That said you guys have it easy given that you neither have gender options for terms like Pilot or Fanatic or Guitarist. Neither do you have gender specific articles. For example, in German "the pickup" (
der Tonabnehmer) is male, "the guitar" (
die Gitarre) is female and "the guitar pedal" is neutral (
das Gitarrenpedal).
Wow, this thread has quickly gone off-topic haha