"gay" redux

Ben Zimmer bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Sat Nov 3 12:41:52 UTC 2012


On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 8:40 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> Despite the existence of a seemingly unequivocal 1933 ex. in HDAS (from a
> sub rosa publication read by few), which makes the question of "gay" in
> _Bringing up Baby_ less crucial, the sense doesn't become prominent in
> print till the late '60s - even though homosexuality was widely and openly
> discussed after the appearance of the Kinsey Report on the "Human Male"
> (i.e., mostly white, middle-class, American college guys) twenty years
> earlier.

Sorry, in what way is the 1933 ex. (from Charles Henri-Ford and Parker
Tyler's _The Young and the Evil_) "seemingly unequivocal"? I agree
with Ron Butters that it seems pretty equivocal:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1109D&L=ADS-L&D=0&F=P&I=-3&P=20499

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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