"Brokeback" named Hollywood word of the year

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:39 PM -0800 3/9/06, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>It all calls to mind a highly comic moment once immortalized in
>brief verse. One evening, in the Soudanese capital of Khartoum, a
>"closeted" chap of the sort you describe met a young lady who, it
>soon developed to his chagrin, was secretly a devotee of the
>fictional Bilitis.  After a satisfactory interval of socializing,
>the two repaired to the chap's room where - and here is where the
>true humour begins - they fell into a wrangle concerning exactly how
>the rest of the evening should progress !
>
>   Quite amusing, what ?
>
>   JL

That episode does seem to ring a distant bell from up around County
Limerick, only with a few more wh-questions, as they say in the trade.

LH

>
>Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender: American Dialect Society
>Poster: Laurence Horn
>Subject: Re: "Brokeback" named Hollywood word of the year
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>There was an article in a recent N. Y. Times about "Brokeback
>marriages", which doesn't involve the descriptive adjective
>"brokeback" per se, but is a direct reference to the kind of marriage
>depicted in the movie: closeted gay man + unaware straight woman.
>Judging from other recent hits, this has come to be used quite widely
>for the same (not particularly new) phenomenon. (The article cited
>the marriages of, inter al., Oscar and Constance Wilde, Cole and
>Linda Porter, Rock Hudson & Phyllis Gates, and Mr. and Mrs. James
>(the Gay-American Governor) McGreevey, although at least some of
>these relationships involved not necessarily unaware women--the
>Porters for one.)
>
>Larry
>
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