with Arthur Godfrey on the CBS radio network."
That is all.
Not as funny as the old Lucille Ball radio show “My Favorite Husband.” A third of the episodes start out with “Gee Liz, you’re looking gay today.” Or “Liz why are you so gay today”?
People of my age are heavily prejudiced against gays for one reason only - their predecessors have ruined the very expressive word “gay”.
You are jeering at people for their unconscious use of a word, which has has massive change forced upon it. It had a very precise meaning in the past, describing the kind of person who is jolly and cheerful. That’s not the kind of idiot who keeps telling one-liners, nor the noisy drunk. It’s the kind of person who sings while they work, someone who makes people happy. The person who is fun to be with, who doesn’t need alcohol to be great company.
That’s why you will come across it so often in past media and literature. It had real resonance. Now that the word has been sacrificed, there is no equivalent word which exactly hits the old meaning of gay.
I don’t think anyone’s jeering at them. They’re noting an amusing change in meaning caused by a shift in vocabulary.
I’m assuming the bit about this shift being the reason for homophobia was intended as a joke, (although God knows I’ve seen stupider excuses for it) but it’s worth pointing out that you’re also incorrect about the etymology of the word “gay.” It’s meaning was never that unambiguous: it carried an unsavory connotation long before it began to be applied to homosexuals. As early as the 17th century, it was used as a euphemism for prostitution and licentiousness. This is, most likely, where it found its origins as a synonym for homosexual, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century, when it was, unsurprisingly, intended as a slur. It wasn’t until the post-war era that it gained wide-spread currency among the homosexual community as a self-descriptor. Once that association was established, of course, heterosexuals couldn’t divorce themselves from the term fast enough.
Which brings us up to the present day, where gays are accused of “ruining” a perfectly good word. :rolleyes:
To round this post off, I offer the following synonyms for this supposedly irreplaceable word: gleeful, jovial, glad, joyous, happy, cheerful, sprightly, blithe, airy, light-hearted; vivacious, frolicsome, sportive, hilarious, jolly, joyful, and merry.
Exactly right. I found the “daytime is the gaytime” slogan particularly amusing because, based on what I’ve read about him, Arthur Godfrey wasn’t gay in either sense of the word.
And the Flintstones had a gay old time.
BTW, in the 20s gay=homosexual was well established within the gay community, and not as a slur. It was usually used as a signal – you could go up to a strange and ask if he knew any gay places for the evening. If he were homosexual, he’d pick up on that; if he were straight, he wouldn’t.
Excellent post.
mmm
Sure, but at that point, it was more of a slang or code-word, and not an identity as such. Presumably, the men using the term this way didn’t intend it as a slur, but it’s not like there were any positive or neutral terms they could have used instead. Gay likely won out as the identifier of choice because the word had that additional, positive definition. If the word didn’t already have some currency as a gay slur, it likely would have been some other slur that eventually got adopted and rehabilitated as the descriptor-of-choice for the homosexual community.
I think that’s self-evident… do I need to add smileys to every obvious joke? :rolleyes:
While it has had occasional slang uses, it has always kept its core meaning. Unfortunately, the current use seems to have destroyed the old meaning, and any use in the former sense leads to hilarity. As in this thread.
Thank you for the attempted synonyms, which beautifully demonstrate the variety of the English language - and the limitations of a thesaurus. None of these are the exact equivalent of what the word “gay” meant. That’s why the word was so ubiquitous in the past, and why I mourn its loss.
Then why don’t you open your own thread in which to mourn instead of pissing all over this one?
Maybe just the ones that aren’t particularly funny?
Words don’t really have core meanings. When someone used the word “gay” to refer to a prostitute, the word meant “prostitute.” When they used it to mean “happy,” it meant “happy.” And when they used it to mean “homosexual,” it meant “homosexual.” None of these is a “core” meaning, in the sense that it was a more correct definition - they simply had differing levels of common usage.
I think you’re imputing far too specific a shade of meaning to a word that has an overabundance of acceptable synonyms. Gay has largely lost its meaning as “joyful” and become almost entirely synonymous with “homosexual,” because there’s an ample amount of alternatives to the former definition, and a dearth of alternatives to the latter.
With respect (which you are not showing to me), and to use your own pungent term, this thread was opened to piss on innocent people who used a word in its ordinary fashion.
If you read newspaper and magazine articles that I wrote in the 70s and 80s, you would soon be pissing on me too. And that’s not a nice feeling.
No, just to ones that are not obviously jokes.
I have no doubt that I would find much of what you write laughable.
That’s totally different, they were stating that Barney and Fred were having homosexual parties (AKA orgies) at the Water Buffalo club meeting 
Wrong! While it didn’t originally mean precisely a “homosexual”, it did originally mean carnal pleasures. Here’s Cecil’s column on the matter.
I suggest you read the article again. Like very many other words, the word “gay” has had various slang meanings over time, but it always retained its core meaning for the majority of people. So, if one said “John is a gay person” no one thought it referred to his sexuality - unless one was using a private code for something else.
When I was involved in the sexual rights movement in Ireland in the 60s and 70s, the word gay was rarely used in this context even among activists. A demand for Gay Rights would have been met with puzzlement by most people. It was not generally understood to have any second meaning - and I believe that applied to the people who would now use it to describe themselves.
You can see this in many ways. At the time, Gay was the standard abbreviation for the names Gabriel or Gabrielle. A well-known clothes store was called “Gay Wear” - it changed to A-Wear when the meaning changed. A leading theatre was the Gaiety. You can dig into any past media and see only only one meaning for the word. It had no sexual implication until the late 70s, early 80s, when the new meaning was imported from the USA.
That loss of meaning is a pity.
Yes, from your manner of discussion, that is plain. I think you do not understand which of the two of us is damned by that statement.
Enough. Michael of Lucan, if you want to open a different thread to talk about your opinion on the change in the meaning of “gay,” please open a new thread in Great Debates or Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share. Anyone who disagrees with you can do argue with you in that thread. No one in this thread is being pissed on or abused. Language changes over time and the OP and the other posters were getting some laughs from it. It happens and it’s not hurting anyone. So this tangent needs to go somewhere else.
I accept your ruling. But as a moderator you might consider that the thread is essentially homophobic in its original format. If it’s not, why is it such a source of laughs? Seems obvious to me.
Over and out.