Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Words, Words, Words

Yes, this is a throwback to Shakespeare, but this entry is not about the Bard.  It is about the word gay.

A member of our Toastmasters club gave a riveting speech last night, discussing how we came about to associate gay with homosexual.  Evidently, it was a missed media opportunity, because whatever the media did to try to associate the word with homosexuality did not "take," with the result that what used to mean merry, jolly, carefree has now come to mean nothing of the sort.  Indeed, those definitions show up at the end of a dictionary entry for gay.