Sonic The Hedgedawg
Smash Hero
while that may be true, the word "gay" to mean "homosexual" developed out of nothing as well. Words are just sounds made by the mouth or symbols made by the hand. they have no meanings save the meanings we give them. Whether or not the etymology of the phrase "that's so gay" has homosexually pejoritive roots or not, the fact is, those roots are, at the most, vestigial now. The current meaning of that phrase in no way reflects anything on homosexuality. I mean, hell, a ****** is a cigarette butt in Britan or a bundle of sticks for burning in older english, but somehow it came to be pejorative to homosexuals. The difference between that word and "gay", however, is the power it holds. To say something is "gay" when you mean it's cheap or stupid, you are saying only that it's cheap or stupid... but the word *** has an incredibly negative connotation because, in modern American English, at least, it has absolutelty no meaning besides it's heavily understood slang meaning which is intended to be nothing but derrogatory towards homosexuals.
That's why I think it's completely reasonable to draw the line there; a person can say "that's so gay" without ever intending to insult or even thinking about homosexuality in any sense, but when someone calls someone else a "***" there is absolutely no other meaning and it's meant to be an insult meaning, even if the person at whom the insult is aimed is NOT gay, the user of the insult suggests that being gay is something bad, something for which one can be insulted.
Anyway, my point is this: all language, but especially the english language, is very dynamic. As we go through the years, the meaning of words will change. Slang words are especially vulnerable to this steady change of meaning; some slang today may become standard vernacular tomorrow, some may change meaning entirely and still some others may become obselete and fade away. Regardless of what the eventual fate or tumultuous history of a word may be, the only meaning we can gain from it is the meaning which, to it, has currently been assigned. With the word in question, "gay," it currently has a few meanings. While the original meaning of "happy" is dated, the current meaning of "homosexual" and the current slang of "cheap or stupid" are just that: current. Both meanings are equally as correct for the word and both are completely different. Because the context is normally fairly discrete for both of them, it's usually very easy to determine which meaning is intended. The fact that the slang meaning is derived from the current meaning is of little importance since the bridge linking those two meanings is, as I said before, vestigial at best. When someone uses pretty much any word we use today, it likely has a history which involves it stemming forth from some other word and changing over time. We don't stop and question the meaning of every word we hear due to the roots from which they were derived. To do so in this particular case is, to me, a severe case of oversensitivity to our GBLT Identity. It's prudent to carefully pick our mountains to die on, and this really shouldn't be one of them. Get out there and crack down on those who legitimately mean us offense, sure, but the use of the phrase "that's so gay" is completely innocuous, so why give us a reputation for being loud and oversensitive just to fight it?
