"Canon," effectively means "the letter of the law" or the "official standard against which something is judged," in a Christian context, it means a moral, ecclesiastical rule.

As applied to modern media, it means the “source material,” the original, officially sanctioned media and storyline. It gets a bit complicated, because there can be several layers of canon. For example, in the case of Sherlock Holmes, the stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are the true canon (the Sherlock Holmes Bible, if you will), but since BBC’s Sherlock is a re-imagining of those stories, they apply certain elements of the Doyle canon to their show and must eliminate others. Since Sherlock is its own show, it has its own canon (it’s own rules, if you will) and when fans refer to the “Sherlock canon,” they mean the plot, standards, and rules of the show, which has, in turn, created its canon from the Doyle canon.

source: http://thesherlockfandom.tumblr.com/post/18439637462/what-does-canon-mean-when-related-to-the-fandoms

Last edited by TeeJay (March 11, 2014 10:21 pm)

And I always thought "canon" was a piece of music by Pachelbel...