Forum: Author Hangout

I wrote that a girl in class was fawning over her teacher. I meant that she was infatuated with him and looking at him dreamy-eyed.

But when I looked it up, I found out that's not what fawning means. This is the definition: "to praise someone too much and give them a lot of attention that is not sincere, in order to get a positive reaction" and "Fawning is perhaps best understood as 'people-pleasing.' According to Walker, who coined the term 'fawn' as it relates to trauma, people with the fawn response are so accommodating of others' needs that they often find themselves in codependent relationships."

So "fawn" is actually a negative term where the person doing it is after something. Does anyone else think "fawning over" is what I thought?

Does anyone else think "fawning over" is what I thought?

Not quite. I understand 'fawning' to involve interaction, whereas dreamy-eyed looks might be purely unidirectional, with the target possibly being oblivious.

I don't know where 'not sincere' comes from. IMO 'fawning' suggests more than is customary and can be negative but doesn't by itself imply insincerity. Of the top ten google entries, only one, from the Cambridge Dictionary, mentions insincerity.

AJ

Unlike all these geniuses, I thought it meant what you believed, and I would have been wrong as well.

Guess that makes us a minority of two.