Balderdash & Piffle

[Jonathan Lighter]

The principle of parsimony rules out Stein's and Coward's uses of "gay" as illustrating the sense "homosexual."

  They may simply have meant "gay."

  JL

Damien Hall <halldj at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Damien Hall
Subject: Balderdash & Piffle
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kim Lomax's list of the main headwords to be covered in each programme of the
*Balderdash & Piffle* series didn't mention that they also seem to be covering
other words that don't begin with the programme's main letter. So, 2 January's
programme was brought to you by the letter p, except that the word *gay* was
also covered in some fashion because of the coverage of *polari*.

FYI, the programme's research had the following effects:
*pear-shaped*: antedatings not accepted because they did not refer clearly to
something going wrong but to things that could actually have had the literal
shape of a pear (balloons)
*polari*: I'm not sure they were trying to antedate this; they were just giving
a history of the word, because it's interesting
*pig*: likewise
*ploughman's lunch*: antedating accepted. The *OED* had a date in the early
1970s but now has 1960, on the basis of letters from the (British) Milk
Marketing Board, preserved in the National Archives, that mentioned these
lunches (because local cheese features prominently in them)

On *gay*, Victoria Coren went in with some 'evidence' from a Gertrude Stein
short story about two ladies who preferred to 'be gay together' and the Noël
Coward song by men who wore green carnations and were 'the reason the Nineties
were gay'. The evidence was not accepted, of course, because it was
deliberately allusive and not directly referential, for good reasons at the
time. Coren was fake-outraged, saying the evidence was 'the gayest thing she
had ever seen' and apparently not understanding the difference between allusion
and clear 'definitional' reference, even though the fact that homosexuality was
legalised in the UK only some time later than Stein and Coward had been
specifically mentioned earlier in the programme. In the *gay* segment, then,
she did lexicographers no favours whatsoever (making them out to be
conservative old codgers trying to hold back the tide), and I rather despised
her for it. The others, though, were very interesting and a good reflection of
what 'word-people' actually do, I thought. I look forward to the rest of the
series, which I'll have to watch online.

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania




---------------------------------
 Yahoo! DSL Something to write home about. Just $16.99/mo. or less