Wouldn’t considering “gay” to be negative and to be avoided, poltically “incorrect”?
I was a teenager during the mid-late 1970s. Gay was one of the all-purpose insults, at least in the northeast. While “gay” clearly meant lame, I only actually connected the two words in the 1990s, after reading a Dan Savage column. I guess I’m saying that while the two words have similar meanings, the tone was very different.
Kids called each other fags as well. They still do, with somewhat more irony.
The Narnia Chronicles, published in the early fifties, still use the word “gay” meaning cheerful. For example “gay colours”. (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader also mentions that at one point several of the sailors had ejaculations, but luckily the author refused to describe them.)
No it doesn’t.
It means they are resistant to change ala my 82 year old Mother who hates the fact that Gay no longer means carefree and the fact that Iran is no longer Persia and Tailand is no longer Siam…
Thailand - although I guess it’s Tail-land too…
:smack:
mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa…
Some folks make fun of the fact other folks arent happy about losing the word gay. I think the traditionalist have a point (not a big one mind you). And its is not neccessarily all about being a rabid gay hater either.
If decades ago, my favorite drink was called a dirty sanchez, I’d be a bit peeved about evolving language too.
Indeed, in my mother’s case it’s not anything to do with being a rabid gay hater.
Um… “Thai” has an H in it, not because the TH combination represents a fricative as in “this thin thing, I think, thawed out thoroughly,” but because it’s an aspirated stop in the dominant dialect of the local language – there’s a puff of air as one properly says “Thai” not present as one says “tie”. But the Thai people, along with the Laotians and a few other groups, speak Tai languages – spelled without the H.
While we’re on the subject of Yssy’s mother (and Sir Winston Churchill agreed with her) and her tastes in nomenclature, it’s worth noting that Iran is an Anglicization of what they’ve always called their country, which derives from the same source as the pre-Godwinized term “Aryan” and the Indian state of Haryana. The particular people among the Iranians responsible for the older English name were the petty kings of an area on the northeast shore of the Persian Gulf and their followers, who referred to their home state as Persis (there are carets over both those S’s in proper typography). When they conquered the Medians, Sogdians, and other neighboring and related peoples, they gave the name Persian Empire to the land of the Iranian peoples. Like the Byzantines, the Habsburgs, and Mussolini hearking back to the glory that was Rome, subsequent empire-builders borrowed the name of the Achaemenid Persians to give their empire a glorious-past patina, right down to the Pahlavis. But the land they all ruled over was Iran, inhabited by Iranian peoples, a few of whom were Persian.
When I was in school (let’s say the 70’s), ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ meant “attracted to people of the same sex”… for men or women. Homosexual was the technical term, gay was the informal version of it.
Somewhere along the way it became “gays and lesbians”. Now, gay (and even homosexual) is generally used to refer only to men. Women who are attracted to women get an entirely separate word and are, apparently, neither gay nor homosexual.
I remember noticing this toward the end of college (mid-80s) but no one has mentioned it here. Does anyone else relate to that or did I grow up in some weird bubble where gay/homosexual was gender neutral?
I remember the same thing. One could say the word lesbian came out the closet later than the word gay. I lived in the deep, but not rural south during those times.
My WAG as to why is that the word lesbian (despite the island and actors related to politicans) really wasnt floating around at the time, so it was safer and less threatening to coopt the word gay first. Once that seemed to fly, it was now safe to try out the word lesbian in mainstream language. Not saying this was some plan masterminded by the rainbow coalition behind closed doors, just that such a evolutionary scenario seems reasonable. IMO even the word gay sounds less “threatening” than lesbian and I would likely think so even if I had a no clue as what either meant.
Yes, that is reflected in the the names of various GLBT organizations. For example, the National Gay Task Force was founded in 1970. They changed their name to National Gay & Lesbian Task Force in 1985. The reason given: “To make clear the commitment to gender parity and lesbian issues”.
I think this was partly in connection with the feminist thought of the times. Women were objecting to always being subsume into a general term (which just happened to always be the male term) – for example, about then ‘mankind’ started to be replaced by ‘humankind’.
But lesbians are included in “homosexual”, since that term is now pretty much confined to medical or scientific use, and under those definitions usually does include lesbians. Except for right-wing homophobes; they like to use ‘homosexual’ because it sounds more scary.
I was starting to wonder the same thing.
Polycarp - Thank you for this:)
I love learning new things:D
Oh, I think most English speakers aspirate the /t/ in “tie” as well. In fact, if they were to hear it unaspirated, they would probably think it sounded like “die”; in many contexts, aspiration ends up proxying for contrasts which are nominally of voicing instead.
:smack: True. Got an example, preferably with the /tai/ sound, where there’s an unaspirated /t/ sound? I personally don’t notice an aspiration in “tie” – but that may be what my ear ‘expects’ to hear.
Sure. Most English speakers don’t aspirate the /t/ in “sty”. In fact, if you record yourself saying “sty” and then start playing it from after the /s/, you will probably find that the result sounds like “die”.
(Hell, I just tried it right now, and I’m still sort of shocked by how well it works)
“Homosexual” is still gender neutral, and if people you know feel otherwise then I’d suggest it’s your current bubble that’s weird. The OED does note that in a non-technical context “homosexual” may be taken to mean male homosexuals in particular, but that’s because “lesbian” is the common word for female homosexuals. So if the speaker specifically meant homosexual women then they presumably would have just said “lesbian” instead. But “homosexual women” is perfectly correct, as is “homosexuals” or “homosexual people” to refer to both men and women.
Most studies indicate that there are in fact more men than women who self-identify as homosexual, so that may be another reason why one might assume that “homosexual” means “homosexual men”. Public discourse about homosexuality also tends to focus more on men than women – I have seen lesbians described as the “invisible homosexuals”. So that’s another reason why GLBT groups might want to make it clear that they really do mean to include homosexual women.
“Gay” is far more likely to refer to men than women, and if anything this seems to have been more true in the past than it is today. But it’s not unheard of to use the same word to describe a homosexual woman. I’ve certainly known women who said “I’m gay”, and IIRC Ellen DeGeneres has said she prefers to be described as a gay woman rather than a lesbian.
It is a funny quirk of the English language that we do have a polite, long-established, common term that unambiguously means homosexual women, but not a truly equivalent term for homosexual men.
My first thought for a quantitative answer was to look at the history of “Gay” as a name; basically, I figured it would have to disappear almost entirely at the point when the association with homosexuality became complete. The Baby Name Wizard will graph US prevalence of any name. “Gay” had its peak popularity in the 50’s, topping out at 371th most popular for girls. In the 60s, it dropped to the 500s. In the 70s, it had dropped out of the top 1000, and had essentially disappeared by what looks to be about 1978. So 1978 is my answer.
My Mother-in-law was lamenting the loss of the word’s meaning of carefree, fun, silly, and how in her day, they would have a gay picnic. I commented that while that was certainly a loss, there was a greater gain: We don’t have to have parades in honor of Sodomite Pride Day.