It’s an adjective. Have you never heard of Sapphic love, i.e. erotic affection between women?
Not sure what’s misleading about it. the word is so tightly associated with female homosexuality that it’s the first thing almost everybody thinks of if you use it - so much so that if you wanted to describe a woman as being from Lesbos, you definitely wouldn’t refer to her as a Lesbian because people would get the wrong idea.
“Gay” has a similar history. It used to just mean happy, but these days if you describe a man as “gay”, people will think that he beds other men.
I guess that’s what he thinks is misleading. The word can’t be used to describe someone from Lesbos because of its more common English meaning. Is this a problem? I don’t know. I’ve never had to talk about someone from Lesbos. How do Lesbosians feel about it?
That’s the thing: it’s not misleading if virtually everybody understands the same meaning when you use the word. Since virtually everyone first thinks “homosexual female” when you use the word, it would only be misleading if you were using it to describe a straight woman from Lesbos. Or really, anything at all from Lesbos.
Some years ago the folks at the Onion published a book containing “articles” from the past 100 years. In one of these articles, ostensibly from the 1920’s, the headline declared San Francisco the “gayest city ever” and then the article exclusively described what a cheerful, upbeat place it was.
I am not even sure how gay or bi Sappho was, nor, frankly, why anyone would think it was important, as opposed to, say, her work. Gross sexists never change.
Use in a sentence: All the haters pretended Sapphic distichs lacked enough spark for their purposes, while in reality there was no cure for their own utter insipidity.
Lesbians is the most common name (for Mytileneans), not sure how often I have heard Lesbiot (cf Rhodian, Rhodiot). This should be in no wise confusing.
In a similar vein, back in the day when Venus was a jungle planet and getting a lot more science fiction stories written about it than today’s hellhole, the proper adjective was “venereal” as in venereal vine or venereal bedrock.
Are you sure? Every bit of your post is Greek to me.
I wasn’t clear: I have actually only heard ‘sapphic’ spoken aloud a few times, always by people speaking English, and each time they pronounced it as ‘saf-fik’ so I presumed that is the ‘correct’ English pronunciation. Maybe I’m wrong, and they were too?
I just realized that my question also applies to ‘sapphire’, so I guess it’s some lesser rule of pronunciation I never learned about.
That’s been my experience, too – I’ve only ever heard it pronounced “SAF-fik.” My guess would be that the hard “p” sound from the original Greek got lost along the way as the term became Anglicized and popularized.
in French, saphir and saphique have only one P, but come from two different words: maybe the letter Pi gave “pp” in English and “p” in French.
And women who loved others women were called 'tribades" in old French, from the root tribein, to rub.
For at least a few of those those are stereotypes about a subset of people who the adjective applied to, even for the period the poetic usage references. At no point did anyone think your average byzantine was devious and/or complex, people knew the reference was to the politics and power struggles. Which is not all that different from people knowing, when lesbian came into use, that it wasn’t about everyone on Lesbos, but was referencing the island’s claim to fame.
It’s especially not different from delphic, which is about the utterances of the oracle, not even everyone in the temple.
If we didn’t have this use of “Lesbian” to mean both Female Homosexuals and Inhabitants of Lesbos, then we couldn’t have threads with headlines like this:
(16th-century French saphique, sapphique)
