De-gaying

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:06 PM -0800 3/7/04, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>?What a hilarious word! From the Boston Globe, March 7, 2004. Hard to check
>on Google because it doesn't discriminate for hyphens.
>
>         First, she pulled the pink triangle magnet off the refrigerator.
>Then, all the lesbian-friendly books and record albums had to be hidden. She
>scoured the house to remove any love notes between her mother and her
>mother's girlfriend.  Just for good measure, she told her mother not to wear
>her Birkenstock sandals, because, of course, everybody knew that lesbians
>wore those.  As for the bathroom wallpaper festooned with women, she just
>sighed.
>         "You de-gay the house," said Heller, now 33.  "I was absolutely
>paranoid about my friends finding out."
>
>Benjamin Barrett

Very nice.  And I like the fact that it conforms to my (admittedly
not always reliable generalization on the use of de- as a
category-changing prefix for denominal and deadjectival privative
verbs; other attested examples are _de-stale_ (an old bagel),
_de-rice_ a child's hair.  (As opposed to the less likely innovative
verb "un-gay", "un-stale", "un-rice", given the absence of verbal
bases for these.)  Yes, the verbs "unnerve", "unsex", and "unman"
would be counterexamples to the generalization, but they were
lexically established centuries ago, when the division of labor
between un-verbs and de-verbs was not yet functional.

Larry Horn