👉 Okay, alright settle down now, let’s tackle this…
newfans
. Now, frankly, I haven’t seen a whole lotta documented use of that one anywhere official, which honestly, kind of begs the question. It's a relatively new, and somewhat aggressively localized, piece of 2000s-era American turf slang, predominantly bubbling up in and around the midwest—think of it as the verbal equivalent of a really aggressive shag wig.
Basically, a "newfans"—and I’m putting that with an “a'’ rather than a goofy one—is a ridiculously overblown, hysterical exaggeration. It means something went spectacularly, almost unbelievably badly; you basically experienced total and utter failure in a way that’s so absurd, the only reasonable response is to laugh into your napkin. The origin? Nobody genuinely knows. There are competing theories involving early-aughts boy bands overdosing on their own manufactured awesomeness, botched attempt after botched attempt of DIY car detailing resulting in a spectacular oil slick, and even one rather disturbing rumour that it was coined by a guy who kept messing around with the autocorrect function during a bad breakup. The point is: you aren't just saying something went terribly; you are declaring it to be so monumentally shit, its ridiculousness is almost immediately funny. There’s an undercurrent of schadenfreude—the pleasure from someone else's misfortune—which honestly
