Missing variable in intro courses [long]

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:57 PM -0500 8/12/00, Mai Kuha wrote:
>In my undergrad language and society class this fall, I'd like to assign
>one reading on language in the gay community, and spend one 75-minute
>period on the topic. Any recommendations for what to assign as reading and
>how to spend that time in a way that is likely to do more good than harm?
>
In the Dialects of English course I co-teach with a colleague at
Yale, I spend one lecture (abysmally brief, to be sure, as is the one
lecture we devote to male vs. female speech practices) on sexual
orientation as a variable.  While we are able to use Chapter 7 of
Wolfram & Schilling-Estes as the principal reading for the gender
lecture (along with "The New Pygmalion" from Cameron's _Verbal
Hygiene_), the orientation lecture has no corresponding chapter in
_American English_), so the last time around I assigned two articles
from Hall & Livia's Queerly Phrased:  Zwicky on "Two Lavender
Issues..." and Barrett on "The 'homo-genius' speech community".  Your
suggestions look equally germane, although book chapters sometime
presuppose discussion from earlier chapters in a way that
self-standing articles don't.

Anyone else have suggestions?  I'll be making up my new syllabus in a
couple of weeks for this fall's version of the dialects course, so my
and Mai's eyes will be equally peeled.*

larry


*Can that be right?  Do people really keep their eyes peeled?
pealed?  And why?  I can't find either sense in my AHD!