The Oxford English Dictionary defines fubsy as meaning "fat and squat, from late 18th century: from dialect fubs 'small fat person', perhaps a blend of fat and chub," but Dick Eney implies a more attractive fannish meaning: "plump, pleasant and slightly pedomorphic." In I Will Fear No Evil, Robert A. Heinlein refers to "a round, fubsy box."
This perhaps means only that both of them had a taste for obscure vocabulary and the word was never fanspeak at all, but we thought you'd like to know what it means, anyway.
| From Fancyclopedia 2, ca. 1959
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| And looking at the result a generation later makes me uncomfortably aware of the changes that took place since 1959. I can laugh at my comment to our remote posterity, "For our readers in the year 2000..." But who'd have thought that describing Kabu's females as "fubsy" [plump, pleasant and slightly pedomorphic] would have become offensive for people who saw the word as related to "fubba-wubba" [fat, sloppy and cranky]?
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| This is a fanspeak page. Please extend it by adding information about when and by whom it was coined, whether it’s still in use, etc.
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