brokeback/SOTU

[Laurence Horn]

>On Tue, Jan 31, 2006 at 11:17:57PM -0500, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>>  Maybe it had something to do with "Brokeback Mountain" getting all of
>>  those Oscar nominations earlier today, but the emerging sense of
>>  "brokeback" meaning 'homosocial' (or whatever) showed up in at least
>>  two political blogs on the State of the Union address.
>
>I was meaning to mention that I heard a natural use of
>_brokeback_ in the wild the other day.  The relevant sentence
>was along the lines of "He got a Hummer? That's so
>brokeback!". On further questioning, the speaker said that it
>was used in reference to things that are so exaggeratedly
>masculine as to call into question the sexuality of the man
>involved. Thus a man driving a minivan wouldn't be brokeback,
>but a man driving a Hummer would be. Speaker was a New York-
>raised late-30s heterosexual man, who hadn't seen the film.
>
Then there's the small h- reading of hummer, but I suppose that would
just complicate matters...

LH

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