From a Nanny episode featuring a 1940’s flashback:
Sheffield: Niles is a queer old boy, but we’ve shared a few fags and had a gay old time.
Nanny: So you’re saying Niles is odd, but you’ve had a few cigarettes together and had a good time.
Sheffield: Yes. Why do you ask?
Nanny: Just checking.
“And the negro rushed forward” would be an AWESOME title for Obama’s memoirs.
and the negro rushed forward. and the negro rushed forward. and the negro rushed forward. that line is so wrong and so awesome on so many levels.
I think I am suffering from faggism.
Peter O’Toole.
IIRC, First visit to the US. Got off the plane and asked a cop, “Do you know where I can a couple of fags around here?”
Hilarity ensued.
America running on Dunkin notwithstanding, the word is “doughnut”.
Sometime it was used in even more innocent context to simply mean “to be very charming”. I remember reading an old story in which a young girl (as in 6 years old or so) was described as “making love to the whole room”.
In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett thought about how she could have stood letting other men make love to her when she was so in love with Ashley.
Knowing when the book was written, I rather figured the definition had changed. I thought it meant flirting.
In The Silver Chair, one of the Narnia books, Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum find themselves with the giants. When trying to discover what the giants’ plans for them are, Jill
Are you perhaps thinking of C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair? Jill is described as making love to the all the residents in a castle to convince them that she and her companions are clueless about the plans to cook them for dinner. Given that said residents are giants, the contemporary meaning of “make love” is even more disturbing.
Jill’s not six, though. She’s at least 12 or 13, I should think.
ETA: That’ll teach me to respond to an hours-old post without reading the rest of the thread.
I like the words Thee and Thine and Thou-ist and Whilst and Whence…
Whoever took those words away should ALSO be taken away and LOCKED away
Quick someone write me a hikou using those words
I don’t think so. I did read the Narnia books, but I seem to recall the scene I read about being some sort of house party, and it was the hosts’ young daughter that was being cute and showing off and thusly “making love” to everyone. I don’t really remember anything else about the book though. Just that scene because that was the first time I had heard anyone use that definition of the phrase. I remember thinking “Wait, what?” and re-reading the sentence because I thought I must have read it wrong.
From The Adventures of Sally, P.G. Wodehouse:
To be fair, that one hasn’t really changed. People still talk about someone being straight with them, or giving them a straight line, or being a straight-up kind of person, etc.
And to answer the question I completely missed on the previous page, yes, I was talking about English public schools. Here, the ones that you don’t pay for are called state schools. Public schools are the really posh, usually very old, ones. Private or independent schools are the ones that wish they were as upper-class as the public schools and charge large fees to mostly middle-class parents.
Teacake, we still use “straight” with the the same meaning as it’s used in the quote, but not with that phrasing. We don’t just refer to someone as “straight” unless we mean heterosexual–it’s always part of a phrase, as in the examples you gave.
From The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:
That must have been some dream Watson was having. 
At my (state) school, the senior teachers wore gowns almost all the time and mortar boards at formal occasions. Prefects had stripey purple and white ties. No gowns.
Nowadays, for the same meaning in modern text it would sound like this:
Still sounds wonky to me, but it doesn’t sound like she means he’s gay. And by gay I mean homosexual. ERm, Uuugh OK I give up.
Though at my bog-standard state comprehensive the prefects did wear gowns (no mortarboards, though). Only while on duty ejecting miscreants and ne’er-do-wells from the corridors during breaktime, but we did have them.
I would have preferred one of those rather smart enamel badges, myself, but no: gowns it was.
What, actual academic gowns? When was this, if you don’t mind me asking? And the same question to kevlaw, please!
Sure – simple plain black ones similar to this, without the cap and hood.
This was in the 70s. Only one of our teachers regularly wore a gown, and the fact that he was known to everyone (even, I suspect, some of the teachers) as “Mad Jack” should tell you all that needs telling.
