HIGH GEAR/JULY 1978

WAIT'LL YOU SEE THIS...!

The following is an excerpt from an article entitled "Destroying Good Words" which appeared in the April 25, 1978 issue of Esquire magazine. The author, critic John Simon, writes a regular column on English usage for the magazine. Any thoughts and/or rebuttals regarding Mr. Simon's presentation Welcome and will be printed in later issues of High Gear.

are

womanliness, paratrooper or dictionary; then why shorten homosexual?

Secondly, the once prevalent, now blessedly defunct, homo may rankle in some memories. But homo is merely Greek for the same and, although misleading and probably mischievous in this sense, is not instrinsically base, as, say, kike is, and if our society does not come to accept homosexuality, you may be sure that gay will, soomer or later, give rise to some similar pejorative distortion.

Meanwhile, there is every reason to object to a supposedly official word that carries clear implications of whoring.

"...What I am leading up to is the wanton and shocking destruction of the good and necessary English word gay. One fine, or not so fine, some homosexual pressure group in America decided that the preferred term for homosexual was henceforth to be gay. And forthwith there was gay liberation, gay whatnot, and, worse yet, the substantive a gay. Although there is considerable disagreement about how it all just as offensive as any crudely

came to pass, the presumable source of the term is gay boy. Australian slang for homosexual. Where, however, did the Aussies

get it?

As Eric Partridge's A Dic\tionary of Slang and Unconventional English makes clear, the word comes from early nineteenth-century British slang. where the adjective gay referred to "women leading...a harlot's life." Accordingly, gay bit was a whore; gay house, a brothel What kind of honorific, then, is gay? Homosexual is a precise and dignified word, against which only two, equally unwarranted, objections are possible. First, that is long. But, though brevity is a virture, we have many four or five-syllable words happily ensconced in everyday use. No one has objected to and shortened pediatrician

or

Apparently, some homosexuals who advocate it must have been of the "screaming queen" type, which ostentatiously act out a parody

of homosexual behavior. This is

aggressive

heterosexual

behavior, e.g., pinching women's posteriors, whistling at passing females, et cetera. Such homosexual shenanigans might seem gay in the established sense of the word but are merely desperate, undignified, and pathetic.

Other homosexuals may have felt that prevalent patterns of promiscuity in homosexual behavior(probably socially conditioned rather than inherent) justify the use of such a whorish word. That, however, is self-hate and should not be legitimized. And some self-deceivers and hypocrites may have actually believed that homosexual lives are merrier than heterosexual ones and so merit the appellation gay. Yet such manifest untruth cannot be endorsed.

To be sure. Partridge gives us

two other slang meanings of gay. One is "slightly intoxicated," and though alcoholism seems to be a not uncommon phenomenon among homosexuals, it is hardly something that can or should be so memorialized. The other is, "impudent, impertinent, presumptuous," and that at least applies to those who would enshrine gay as the correct term for homosexual, though this could hardly have been the intended saning. But whatever

the intention, be it noted that many, if not most, civilized homosexuals refuse to call themselves or others gay. On The Cavett Show, Gore Vidal rejected the word.

The problem is that this special-interest use of gay undermines the correct use of a legitimate and needed English

word. It now becomes am-

biguous to call a cheerful per-

son or thing gay; to wish someone a gay journey or holiday, for example, may have totally uncalled-for over-and undertones, and, in conservative circles, may even be considered insulting. The insulting aspect we can eventually get rid of; the ambiguous, never. What do we do about it? If we energetically reject gay as a legitimate synonym for homosexual, it may not be top late to bury this linguistic abomination."

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