"That's so gay" controversy

[Chad Douglas Nilep]

But talk of 'lame' should remind us of Labov's (informants') "lames" (1972), which, in turn, leads one to remember Barrett (1997) and others' (e.g. Morgan 1994) suggestion that those "lames" included, among others, "punks," or homosexual men.

On the other hand, 'punk' as an adjective does seem (mostly) to have lost any sexual sense, at least for some speakers / networks... though perhaps not for speakers of Black English dialects in the US? 

Chad D. Nilep
Linguistics
University of Colorado at Boulder
Anthropology
University of Colorado at Denver


---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2007 14:45:52 -0500
>From: GABRIELLA MODAN <modan.1 at osu.edu>  
>Subject: Re: RE: [Linganth] "That's so gay" controversy  
>To: linganth at ats.rochester.edu
>
>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
>
>