What is gay?

[Supermumz]

DS aged 8 asked me the meaning of gay. Picked it from school I think.. What do I tell him? Do your kids know?

Am liking Scurry's nan being happy with "cunt"

hee hee

Yes, Lenin. Should all go without saying (although to be fair I think Pixie was arguing about evolution of lang in gen terms rather than gay being ok per se. Or she's a right old cunt)

To those parents who are unsure what to tell their dc - don't you know any gay people????

Ours have grown up with hommerseckshals all over the shop so it's never been an issue

It's up there with 'spazz', 'mong', 'retard' etc IMO. It's not some new evolved usage, it's an implication that 'homosexual' is synomonous with 'defective'.

yy

I had lunch with some parents and kids recently (new ones) and one 12 yr old girl said her friend's pencil case was "gay." My dc looked at me in horror (more in case I humiliated them with one of my kindly and interminable lectures about it) and I waited for the relevant adult to say something...nothing. The next time she said it, I had to say something on behalf of The Gays, at which point the other adults mumbled hmm hmm yes a bit. And these are intelligent etc. Hopeless.

Parents disapproving of teenagers language? Won't someone please alert the town elders.

Language evolves, and so it should otherwise we'd be French. 'The kids' will always seek to evolve it and subvert it to their own ends, and it is quite right that they should do so in ways adults find unpalletable. It's what our parents did to our grandparents, it's what we did to our parents, and it's what our grandchildren will do to our children.

As someone else pointed out, our language is full of innocuous phrases that started off as offensive, but are no longer so. Berk, nitty-gritty, wanker, and a whole host of others.

King Canute himself couldn't find a more pointless windmill to tilt at than trying to stem the tide of language evolution.

Heh, unpalletable. I am so gay.

Really haven't HG. I saw the point, considered the point, even made the point tea and crumpets while it explained its full intricacies and subtlties, then rejected the point.

Differing opinions and all that.

So you think it's ok that gay is used as a pejorative adjective?

Right. You have fun, now.

No, I don't think it is OK as it happens, but until they elect me Governor of English Language Evolution, there is little I can do about the growing consensus that gay now has at least three separate meanings.

Told you you'd missed the point.

Bristol - please try harder.

The whole city?

I explained that some men love other men and women love other women to my dc when they were really quite small (3 or 4 I think). They accept it as totally normal. Good.

So, cue my dd (7) coming home from school one day and explaining that she was teased about saying that men could marry men ("and they can can't they Mummy - I told them") that it was impossible.

She went back to school next day full of confidence and told the teacher - who backed up the other children -ffs.

But men can't marry other men, or did I read that wrong?

men can civil ceremony other men and will shortly be able to marry them.

BristolJim, you're deliberately missing the point. Men can enter into a Civil Partnership with another man, but is it really necessary to go through the legal differences in marriage and CP to a 7-year-old? No.