Fwd: Fwd: [Linganth] "That's so gay" controversy

[John McCreery]

On 3/12/07, Scott F. Kiesling <kiesling at pitt.edu> wrote:

>
> You cannot use this term without implying that people who
> identify as gay are also lame; it's in the meanings of the
> words.

Really? Are you asserting that every time someone uses a term (here
"gay"), they must be evoking every possible sense in which the term is
used? So that, to use another example, "They had a gay old time" must
include a reference to "gay"(=homosexual)?

The strikes me as the kind of facile semantic generalization that used
to go by names like "false analogy" or "folk etymology." I sometimes
wonder if we who worry about such things don't get so wrapped up in
our own language ideology that we forget that people don't always use
words with the seriousness we attribute to them.

As scholars, we embody a habitus that demands that words be taken
seriously. Couldn't there be times when our  seriousness becomes an
assumption and thus a bias in the way we collect and interpret our
data? That's the question I'm asking.

--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
http://www.wordworks.jp/