"That's so gay" controversy

[Rudolf P. Gaudio]

I'm glad Galey brought up the pragmatics of 'lame'.  The fact that we've
been using it as a relatively unproblematic translation for 'gay' in its
pejorative sense is ironic to me.  A disabled friend called me on my usage
of it years ago and I've struggled to dislodge it from my lexicon ever
since. 

I don't choose to monitor my speech in this way simply because I'm P.C., or
humorless, or a geeky academic.  I do so because when my disabled friend
told me my usage of the word 'lame' was hurtful to her, I believed her.  I
still do use it sometimes--it's widely used in my social circles, which are
almost entirely able-bodied--but I would never try to *defend* my usage as
if my friend's feelings were irrelevant to me.

Re. "that's so gay":  when my brother's kids started using that expression,
he told them not to, because their uncle (me) was gay and it would make me
sad if I heard them using it.  He was right, they stopped using it, and I'm
grateful to all of them.

-Rudi Gaudio      


On 3/12/07 2:45 PM, "GABRIELLA MODAN" <modan.1 at osu.edu> wrote:

> Here's the message I meant to send but forgot to paste in!
> 
> Galey
> 
> Another question that this discussion brings up is whether words like this
> ever get totally resignified so that they lose their original connection with
> the group they once referred to. I had thought that this seemed to be the case
> with the term 'jerry-rigged' (derogatory term for Germans), but, according to
> my students from southern Ohio, the group-ID meaning stuck around enough that
> people in southern Ohio think it's an old derogatory term for African
> Americans. 
> 
> I'm wondering what people think about the term 'lame', though. From the ways
> it's been used in this discussion it seems it has become largely decoupled
> from the meaning 'disabled in the foot or leg'. Is this the case, or does it
> still have some residual meaning from the original? My guess is that it is
> further along in the decoupling process because 'lame' is falling out of use
> in its original meaning. Is this common? In other words, can 'lame' or 'gay'
> or any other generalized pejorative only lose its connection to a group when
> that term falls out of usage as a literal (derogatory or not) referent to that
> group?
> 
> And in regard to John's question about whether 'that's so gay' is related to
> homosexual gay -- it's not a coincidence that 'that's so gay' means exactly
> the same thing as 'that's so queer'. (But I would argue actually means
> something different than 'that's so lame'. It would not make sense to say
> 'that's so gay' to mean, that's a really lousy excuse.)
> 
> Galey
> 
> 

-- 
Rudolf P. Gaudio
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Coordinator, Program in Media, Society & the Arts
School of Natural & Social Sciences
Purchase College, SUNY
Purchase, NY 11372
rudolf.gaudio at purchase.edu