"boy friend/ boyfriend" [WAS a new kind of "guy"]

[Jonathan Lighter]

Off topic, but useless information should be shared:

  Later Greek tradition tended to the view that Pat and Ack were lovers, and Shakespeare's _Troilus & Cressida_ is in line with that.  There is, however, nothing whatever in the Iliad to indicate that they were anything other than cousins and foster brothers, having grown up, as Homer tells us, in the court of Peleus in Phthia. There is even a reference to both characters in bed with female concubines.

  The primary source of the assumption that the dynamic duo was gay seems always to have been the extreme grief Ack expresses for the loss of Pat.  Ack, however, is one-half immortal and nearly everything he does is excessive by later, North European, stiff-upper-lip standards. (And compare the extreme demonstrations of emotion coming out of the eastern Mediterranean and points east on video almost every week.)

  One could claim on equal authority that because Hekuba exposes her breasts in grief to her son Hektor when his death is imminent that something umunusual is going on there. I doubt it.

  There is very little basis in the Iliad itself for assuming a gay relationship between
  A & P.

  JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: "boy friend/ boyfriend" [WAS a new kind of "guy"]
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At 11:02 PM -0400 6/17/07, Mark Mandel wrote:
>Whoops, my error. I mistook the aside as part of the quotation, not your
>comment on it. Color my face red.
>
>m a m

Ironically (if I can get away with using that adverb here), Patroclus
*is* generally recognized as having been Achilles's boyfriend, in the
value-added sense; it's hard to read either the Iliad or
Shakespeare's T&C any other way. Not that the Lambs would have so
recognized him, at least in print.

LH

>
>On 6/17/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>
>>Mark, this is a kid's book. Written in _1911_.
>>
>> JL
>>
>>Mark Mandel wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>Sender: American Dialect Society
>>Poster: Mark Mandel
>>Subject: Re: "boy friend/ boyfriend" [WAS a new kind of "guy"]
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>On 6/15/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> 1911 Winston Stokes, Charles Lamb & Mary Lamb_All Shakespeare's Tales_ (
>>> N.Y.: Stokes) 302: Troilus and Cressida... Achilles lay idly in his
>>tent,
>>> listening to his boy friend Patroclus. [Not what you think, you filthy
>>> rotter!]
>>
>>
>>That aside makes a good case for a common sexual-attraction use of "boy
>>friend" in 1911.
>>
>>m a m
>>
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