I find it really offensive, and I don’t allow it in my classroom, but it is HARD to convince students that they might be insulting anyone with this usage.
My little boy asked me what it means too. He was playing Yu Gi Oh with the demon spawn of our neighborhood and they told him his cards were gay.
What a moment. Sitting in the drive through of the Barstow Burger King facing a kid that up until that moment- wasn’t accustomed to people using slang in a purposly hurtful way. So even though he has no idea how babies are made, I told him the literal meaning of homosexuality and that the kids were being mean by using the word gay that way. He listened and then calmly told me I needed to have a talk with the kids’ parents
No, it is not blatantly offensive, any more than saying that Italian Americans like red sauce. While not all African Americans like fried chicken, it is a very popular food in African American cuisine. Someone’s got the racial sensitivity meter cranked to “11”.
I think this is really the point…its not used to actually mean gay and its mainly used by children who will soon replace it with something else so i’d just wait for it to pass. Maybe you could lobby the makers of South Park to use a different word? I am astonished that adults even bother finding this offensive…I would like to know if any gay people find this use of the word offensive? Kids will always insult each other and the turn over of which insult is ‘in’ at the time is extremeley quick - don’t sweat your boots, it’ll be gone soon replaced by something equally as purile.
I dont mean to inflame the argument any here, but, since the implication that gay= homosexual was a hijacking of the original meaning, what is the difference between that and a new group of people hijacking the word to mean something else?
I sometimes used “gay” to mean stupid, well over a decade ago. This is not a brand new thing. I guess it finally caught on.
RotorHead, read aaslatten above.
How about using the word fey?
It means doomed or crazy.. It also has some meanings that are not so negative – visionary, precious, unconventional and campy.
That way you can keep them confused. 
Oh, by all means imply that anything not masculine is inferior. :rolleyes: Instead of insulting perhaps 10% of the population, you can insult 50%!
The fact that it originally meant “happy”, then was hijacked to identify people, then was hijacked from that meaning to turn into “stupid”. Had it gone directly from “happy” to “stupid”, no one would care. However, when people are involved in tacitly being slammed, they tend to get a mite upset sometimes.
For myself, I don’t care much that folks use “gay” as a put-down. It personally has little effect on me these days, because I do recognize that most people using it don’t even think about it as a slander against a whole group of people. Its just something you say when you’re upset… “Thats so gay” is no worse in that context than “Thats so stupid!”.
What does worry me is the fact that it has serious impact on those gay youth who are trying to come to terms with their sexuality. If you’re not certain that you being gay is okay within yourself, what kind of pain are you gonna feel when your very own friends appear to think it isn’t… truth doesn’t matter at that point, because you’re getting the false impression that they’ll hate you. Just my take on things…
A lot of kids I work with(15-17 years usually) use “gay” as a negative term. They don’t mean anything by it, but as a certified fag-hag™, it grates on my nerves. I just try to make them think before they say it. For example one might say: “I hate my phone, it’s so fucking gay!” I reply: “I wasn’t aware phones had sexual orientations.” That usually gets me an “um…” “er…” or, “well I didn’t mean it like that”. I dunno if I’ve made anyone think twice about saying it again, but hey it’s worth a try.
Although I am going to ignore the emotial posts in this thread, I did have a few comments to add.
I played in a Magic tournament tonight at the my local game store (which I won… yay me). I didn’t bother anyone about using gay, and just listened to them. After listening to them tonight and reading the responses to my post, I think I have figured out that I am being a tad bit to sensitive.
I still don’t think it is a good thing to say, but perhaps if I back off on my friends it might help. I dunno.
X-Slayer, the whole point of using “gay” as an insult is that “gay is bad.” Of course not everything kids call “gay” is anything related to gays, or sexual in any way. It’s offensive because it assumes “gay is bad” for the insult to work at all.
When I was in h.s. I had a friend named Mike. Now, Mike was a bit of a flake. He had a tendency to not show up, not pay up, not be dependable in any way. We started using the verb “to Mike” meaning “to flake out”. It became quite common, so common that we almost said it in front of Mike by accident, in reference to somebody else. Of course it was an insult to Mike.
I prefer “smurfy,” as originated, I believe, on tomatonation.com. I think it communicates general undesirability and mockability without the offensiveness.
(with apologies to any Smurf-Americans)
To be silent in the face of such things gives your approval.
A few years ago, I found myself working with a teenaged girl (a youth volunteer) at my workplace. I had known her less than an hour when she told me a story about a particularly silly thing a friend of hers had done, and concluded with, “She is so gay!”
I replied lightly, “No; your FRIEND is foolish. I’M gay.”
The deer-in-the-headlights look was priceless.
Mockingbird: I don’t know what else to do. If I harrass them, it makes it worse. If I am silent, it gives my approval. I still don’t think it is proper.
I am very confused.
THANK YOU! This is going to be my response from now on.
SnugTheJoiner, beautiful, is it shareware?
Zoe, I didn’t mean it literally, just that so many “put-downs” guys use are related to lack of masculinity, “You throw like a girl, you pussy” etc that it seems to be a major hang-up.
As for whether I find this usage of the word gay offensive? Yep, offensive and hurtful. Whether it’s their phone that is gay or a video game that is gay what they mean is that it’s shit. The word they choose to describe it’s shitness is a word that describes me. If it makes no difference, then noone is going to feel irked if I choose to replace the word “stupid” in my own vocab with “american”. “Jesus man, could you sound more american?” , “I hate this show, you would think it was american it’s so bad”. I wouldn’t mean anything by it of course, it’s just the way language develops no?
Thankfully my exposure to this usage is confined to the internet, if I was hearing it from people who were actually within arms reach every day, then heads would probably roll.
The thing is, when one tries to censor or make a word taboo, he or she gives the word more emotional impact. When I was younger and more idealistic, I used to correct my peers in regard to speech such as this. The result was resentment and often a spiteful effort to use the offending word as much much as possible in my presence.
I have friends who use “gay” to mean stupid. (I don’t, personally).
However, when they write it down, they spell it “ghey.”
Slight hijack
Out of curiousity, would the same objections to the mis-use of the word ‘gay’ exist if it were being used to conotate a positive thing? The term ‘phat’ now seems to be in vogue this way.