I’m gay and don’t find it funny but would never care enough to protest it. The furor-ette is due to timing: it happened to be in the trailer to a movie during the “Let’s Care About Bullying for a” Week on the 24/7 news; it was Anderson Cooper who actually made an issue of this on his news show because he saw it in the trailer at the theater and it offended him because he himself is… uh… somebody who cares about bullying. That week.
I say (to the protesters, not the OP) “Get the hell over it, you’re only giving Opie Cunningham millions in free publicity for a movie that probably ain’t all that to begin with”.
I’ll just cower over here in the corner, because honestly- one movie that always makes me burst into hysterical laughter is Wedding Crashers. Vince Vaughn is freaking hilarious in that movie.
Perhaps he’ll break character and play, let’s say, a puffy, talkative overgrown slacker who meets somebody who teaches him something important about something-or-other.
I would agree with this, just like “gay” really isn’t used to mean “happy” much anymore either. I work with high school students and will correct them if I hear them call something gay, but honestly, most of them don’t even realize it’s a slur because their whole lives they’ve heard it used to mean “lame.” Hell, even I slip up once in a while and use it to mean lame, because that’s how everyone used it in junior high, high school, and college (I’m 24).
Perhaps not: after all, they were the ones who started using it. I suspect that the connotations are that “straight” = square or boring, and that gays are interesting or exciting in being unstraight.
So let me get this straight (heh, heh)… Homosexuals took a perfectly innocuous word, and turned it to their own uses with their own definition. And now they yowl with protest when someone *else *takes that same word and re-purposes it? I can smell the hypocrisy from here.
To understand this you have to use substitution. If gay means lame or CAN mean lame does that mean it’s OK to use it.
If I said, that guy is so cheap, would it be acceptable to say “That guy is such a Jew.” Or "Can you bargain him down,’ would you say “Can you Jew him down”
I doubt anyone here woud find that acceptable. It’s a bankhanded insult, like saying, “You’re the laziest white person I ever met.” Implying that people of other races are still lazier than the laziest white person.
The agrument that it’s appropriate because gay meant happy and it was taken over to mean homosexual, is weak. Gay is a POSTIVE word. It was never ment to be a slur. No one ever said, “Gee your all smiles and gay today.” Gay never was negative.
By taking over Gay to mean lame you’re saying putting a negative spin on gay people.
Similarly black people get miffed over the word, “niggardly” though it doesn’t have anything to do with the dreaded “n-word” and the two words are etymologically unrelated
From All In The Family
As a gay male, honestly the word use doens’t bother me, but I can see how it does others.
The same way I don’t see the term “Indian” as negative. But using a substitution I can. I don’t see anything wrong with the Cleveland Indians, but the New York Jews, would make me uncomfortable.
I don’t see anything wrong about a bunch of Arkansas folk form the backwoods moving to California and being called the Beverly Hillbillies, but if they had a bunch of poor black folk moving to Michigan and being called the Ne-Grosse Pointe Negroes, that would also cause me to shudder.
As I said, as a gay male it doens’t bother me, but I can see how it might bug some, so when things like this come up I use the substitution technique
Part of the issue isn’t that gay was re-purposed to mean “lame”. It was re-purposed to mean lame specifically because of the reference to people who were gay. It’s taking a term to describe a characteristic of a group of people and turning into a slur. Just because not everyone who uses gay in that way doesn’t mean to slam gays doesn’t change that fact.
I agree with the last two posters that using “gay” to mean “lame” is a slur against gay people. However, I have no problem with a fictional character in a movie being offensive - Opie is right to leave it in the film.
or glum is the opposite of cheerfully gay, I think.