Word of the week: Fawn

Have I told you how lovely you look today?

I’d always assumed that the verb to fawn had a family relationship to the noun fawn: that “behave in a cringing or flattering manner” was something young deer did. After all, there are plenty of animal-kingdom models for noun-verb correspondence. To dog means “to follow or track like a hound,” to parrot means “to repeat mechanically, as a parrot ‘talks,’” and to ape means to copy — monkey see, monkey do.¹

Guess what? I was wrong. The two fawns look identical, but the words came into modern English from different sources and the verb is about 100 years older than the noun.

The verb to fawn has been around since about 1250, and originally applied to animals such as dogs (but not deer). It’s descended from Old English fahnian, to rejoice: a dog fawns by wagging its tail. (The archaic fain — “pleased” or “glad” — is a close relative.) By the early 1300s fawn meant something close to its current meaning: to affect a servile fondness; to court favor or notice by an abject demeanor.

The noun fawn, by contrast, was borrowed from French faon. It’s related — this surprised me! — to Latin fetus (“an offspring”), and first showed up in English in the mid-1300s.

This is not the fawn I was looking for.

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I started thinking about fawn after I read a review in The New Yorker of two recent books about fawning — the human, servile variety. To make things a little more confusing, for me at least, the review begins “It is the afternoon of the fawn,” a pun on The Afternoon of a Faun, the composition by Claude Debussy that became ballets by Vaslav Nijinsky and later by Jerome Robbins. A faun is not a fawn; the former — faunus in the original Latin — was a Roman demigod worshiped by shepherds. But the reviewer, Katy Waldman, is not talking about goatlike imps tootling on panpipes. Nor is she talking about Bambi. She’s talking about people-pleasing.

One of the books reviewed in The New Yorker. The title is actually Fawning, not Fawning Fawning Fawning.

Waldman does draw some parallels between fawns:

Everywhere you turn, in workplaces and households alike, yearlings with saucer eyes, brown felt noses, and stilt-like legs are wondering if you’re mad at them. The fawn response, as it’s known in some precincts of social media, bundles various forms of ingratiating, people-pleasing behavior. It can manifest in threatening situations, where expressing authentic emotion could elicit a powerful person’s wrath or cruelty, or it might be more banal: laughing at a vindictive supervisor’s unfunny joke, saying you love a gift when you don’t, laboring over the perfect string of whimsical emojis to append to an opinion that you’ve expressed over text. In a new book, the clinical psychologist Ingrid Clayton recalls hearing about the concept and feeling that she’d found a skeleton key for understanding both her patients’ lives and her own. “It was like I saw fawning everywhere,” she writes. “We were having a collective awakening.”

( Dr. Ingrid Clayton, by the way, is also here on Substack, where she publishes a newsletter called UnFawning.²)

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The “fawn response” is the newest and least familiar F of the responses to stress; the others are fight, flight, and freeze. Here’s how a WebMD article describes the fawn response:

The fawn response often covers up distress and damage you’re feeling inside due to trauma. Fawning is a common reaction to childhood abuse. The fawn response is your body’s emotional reaction that involves becoming highly agreeable to the person abusing you.

Illustration of trauma responses via PsychCentral.

This clinical interpretation of fawn is relatively new; it was identified by a psychotherapist, Pete Walker, in his 2013 book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Ingrid Clayton, who calls herself a trauma survivor, defines fawning as, among other things, “prioritizing others at the expense of yourself.” As Katy Waldman puts it in her New Yorker review, books like Clayton’s, “reversing a once ubiquitous pop-cultural injunction to empathy, pick up on an ambient suspicion that we’d all be better off if we could just keep our eyes on No. 1.”

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Fawning has also been showing up lately outside the clinical setting. Young adults — I reject generational labels like “Gen Z” — are said to exhibit fawning behavior in the workplace. Who says so? A “people experience director,” that’s who.³

There’s been a lot of fawning outside the office, too. In July 2025 the New York Times calculated that fawning had appeared in 71 articles over the past year, including one about something called Tuna Fight Club, the subject of “video after fawning video.” The current U.S. government is a hotbed of fawning. A September 2025 analysis piece in The Guardian, headlined “The Art of the Fawn,” noted the rise of sycophancy in and around the White House: “World leaders, cabinet members, business moguls and alleged journalists have lined up to provide lessons in the art of the fawn: collectively coming to the conclusion that to deal with Trump, they must speak of him in such glowing terms that it frequently walks right up to the border of sarcasm.” (“It doesn’t work,” countered an opinion piece in the Financial Times.) Sometimes the fawning emanates from the other direction: Trump is “fawning over” Saudi leader Mohammed bin Salman, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, as well as “the much-younger girlfriend of Google co-founder Sergey Brin,” who countered with some reciprocal fawning.

Meanwhile, an increasingly obsequious press has been doing some very public fawning of its own. One of the biggest culprits, especially since its takeover by the eager-to-appease Bari Weiss, has been CBS News. “Weiss recently promoted MAGA-friendly anchor Tony Dokoupil to lead the division’s flagship evening news program,” Salon reported on January 11. “Even by the standards of fawning, pro-Trump coverage, his first week in the spotlight has been a disaster.” (“Eviscerated by idiots,” is how former late-night host David Letterman put it.) Dokoupil ended the January 6 program with “a fawning segment” about Secretary of State Marco Rubio, calling him “the ultimate Florida Man.”⁴

That’s a whole lot of groveling, bootlicking, apple-polishing, sucking up, brown-nosing, and ass-kissing.

It’s always interesting when an old word like fawn — familiar yet quaint, insulting yet safe for polite company — takes on new currency. Its rise reminds me of another animal-derived slur with a similar sense: toady. I wrote about it in November 2018.

1. To badger, oddly enough, comes not from behaviors of the burrowing mammal but from the behavior of the dogs that “pestered” their prey in the medieval sport of badger-baiting.

2. Yes, it’s another Un- name! For more, see my 2024 story on Medium, “All for Un- and Un- for All” (gift link).

3. It seems like only yesterday that employers were kvetching about their youthful employees’ truculence and resistance to authority, but apparently that was a Gen from a different part of the alphabet.

4. It wasn’t quite the compliment Dokoupil intended. “Florida Man,” according to a Wikipedia entry, is an internet meme “referring to an alleged prevalence of people performing irrational, ridiculous, and maniacal actions in the U.S. state of Florida.”