Separately, and I made my position known on the now-deleted AST thread from today, can I request that we please refrain from the use of a certain slur for gay people? Look, I know nobody here is a homophobe. I know that there is irony, in-joking, and a lot of tongue-in-cheek involved here. I respect Jason, and all of you for that matter. This is a personal request. That word, whether in jest or not, offends me on a personal level.
In my never-ending effort to detour threads, I will now take the time to muse on the way words' meanings evolve. When I first encountered the word "faggot," referring to homosexuals, in the early seventies, it was fairly standard over all groups. When homophobes used it, it was negative--but no more than "homosexual" was. It was also standard for homosexuals to use it to describe themselves--and not as a way of co-opting the enemies' slur to defuse its power (in case you're wondering how I can claim any knowledge of this, at the time I was hitching to NYC regularly to go to gay bars in the Village, the Ninth Circle and the Firehouse being favorite haunts). In other words, as a slang term, it was fairly neutral. Within ten years, however, it became overwhelmingly negative. And now, for a far too broad cross-section of the population, it has been somewhat unlinked from even the original negative sense and is now used as a generic insult.
I find all this interesting. I was similarly interested when I learned years ago, as I was editing a book on so-called cultural tourism, that the term "tour bus" was anathema in the tourism business, where "motor coach" had become the term of choice.
Usage is weird.
