Can I post something positive? Even though this is the Pit?
I’m the youngest of three sisters, and when I turned 15, and both my elder sisters had a boyfriend, she once told me, half-jokingly, she had always wanted a lesbian daughter.
I laughed and told her I had to disappoint her, as I knew I wasn’t. My mother is a cool person. She’s one of my best friends. I’ve a few gay friends (and i use the word thus, as that’s the way they describe themselves), and nobody that I know that knows them, has problems with that.
One of my co-workers is gay, very openly so. Sometimes when he does or says something very camp, we exclaim (there’re about 15 in the company) "Jay-sus T, you’re such a fairy!
And then he giggles.
He’s accepted, as he is, by the whole company, by the two male boses that hired him. If we do joke about it, it’s because he does so, first. He’s completely at ease with himself, and I suppose that helps everybody around him to be at ease, too.
No one “stole” the word “gay.” There’s nothing stopping anyone from using “gay” to mean “bright and cheerful” (or any of the other meanings, such as “decoration” or “dissolute”). The point of this thread is the taking of a word which a great number of people use to describe themselves as members of a minority group which is already looked upon by large segments of the population with scorn and derision and using it to be insulting. I don’t appreciate it and, may I add, I don’t appreciate your claiming that my use of the word to describe myself has “ruined” the word for everyone.
Not wanting to be with me seems to be the popular choice of 100% of girls I’ve met so far. I think my social awkwardness has more to do with it than my views on language sensitivity.
I stopped using gay and retarded as derogatory adjectives years ago. Neither do I especially appreciate the usage of such language. Whatever possessed me to write my flippantly dismissive response was a spirit of jest, not animosity. I don’t think most people are actually intending to express hatred towards gays or the retarded when they use those adjectives. It may be in bad taste, but its probably not intended as derogatory towards those groups.
To those who think making fun of the retarded is acceptable, I suggest reading Flowers for Algernon. That was a real eye opener for me.
My mother defined nigger rigged as a repair or accomodation made in a non-standard manner or with non-standard material that funtioned as well as if not superior to the standard method. She usually reffered to this as “Afro-engineered,” correcting herself if she used the other term and telling us that it was wrong to call it that. She used that term rather than term that contained the hated term often as we were poor at the time and could not afford many of the repairs or accomodations that she wanted, but her ingenuity at using the materials at hand provided us with many conveniences that we would otherwise need to forgo. She also explained that the term came about because black people had to be inventive because they had often been denied access to more standard methods by poverty as we had been, or by other actions of bigotry.
Just because a term is convenient doesn’t justify its continued use when it is hurtful. This is not a fight to give up on, and it is not a fight where one should brook excuses such as age of the user or ubiquity of the hated phrase.
Take your smilies and shove them up your ass. And a hearty “fuck you” to Max Torque as well. I have two close relatives, people I love, that are mentally retarded, and you wouldn’t believe the shit they have to eat from jerk-offs like you who think anyone who can’t appreciate such great humor is just being politically correct. Go fuck yourself.
And lest this be a complete hijack, I would never use the term “gay” as a derogatory comment. That would betray the gay people I know and love.
I think his premise is not faulty, if I understand it correctly.
“Gay” meant happy, merry in the late 1800’s. Sometime in the first half of the 20th century, the homosexual meaning came about. Sometime, probably in the 1970’s or so, the word came to be used in a new way, stupid, crazy, foolish, lousy, to quote the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.
The point is that it was straight people who used the word gay to deride homosexual people. It’s only in the last twenty years or so that homosexuals have reapproriated the word gay to describe themselves. Owlofchreamcheese originally said
Homosexual people did not ‘steal’ the word; the word was applied to them. So yes, the premise is faulty.
I correct people if they use ‘gay’ to mean bad, not that I hear it that often in the UK. It’s simple linguistically - use a word in a negative context and that negative connoation will carry over to other contexts. I would also correct them if they used lame or retarded in a negative way, but I haven’t heard those terms used for years.
yeah, you put steal in quotes, but nodice so did I. it wasn’t like the army of the gay snuck up to the word warehouse and put the word in a bag and ran off with it.
the thing about it is that this isn’t the first time the word has changed from an acceptable word to an offencive one (no, being gay isn’t offencive today, but in 1920 it was scandalous)
even you say “homosexuals have reapproriated the word gay”. its a word thats changed meaning once already to something totally unrelated, there shouldn’t be a reason you think it wouldn’t do that again.
Not true. The homosexual community was using the word gayabout itself in the first half of the 20th century. The general populace called homosexuals “fairies” “fags” and “queers.”
I take great offense at these remarks, as I have many relatives who are coprophiles, chronic masturbators, and autosexuals. For how long are we to put up with these things!
