when "intercourse" got funny and where the pale is

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 9/29/06 11:55:06 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:


> I'm not sure "social intercourse" is beyond the pale even now.  I
> just noticed it in a Ruth Rendell detective novel from a few years
> ago
> 

It is also not easy to tell where the pale is stuck. I noted that GAY 
TRAVELER was still the name of a motel in Virginia Beach, VA, well into the 1970s. 
And John Updike wrote of "gay lamp light" long after people had begun 
complaining that the word had been stolen by homosexuals. People tend to soldier on.

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