What did gay used to mean
It is of the least possible affect to me what homosexuals do with one another in the privacy of their homes. They can play dwelling, plot political strategies or couple anonymously--I really don't protect . I'm not offended and I wouldn't try to halt them if I could. But I want the synonyms "gay" back. "Gay" used to be an extremely useful word. It showed up frequently in poetry and prose--Shakespeare used it 12 times--in part because it has no precise synonym. The general sense of the word is a combination of joyous, mirthful, shiny, exuberant, cheerful, sportive, merry, light-hearted, lively, showy and pleasant.
The Oxford English Dictionary requires an entire page to define the etymology and nuances of "gay" as it has appeared in literature throughout history. The citations show that during the 1600s it began to acquire a limited darker meanings and that some used it to represent "prostitute" or to describe someone addicted to social pleasure and dissipation, but on balance the word kept nice company.
Milton wrote of "the gay motes that people the sunbeams." Wordsworth in his "Ode to Duty" claimed "a poet could not but be lgbtq+ / in such a jocund company." The poet Joseph Addison wrote of "Gay
The History of the Word 'Gay' and other Queerwords
Lesbians may have a longer linguistic history than gay men. Contrary to the incomplete information given in the OED, the word lesbian has meant “female homosexual” since at least the early eighteenth century. William King in his satire The Toast (published 1732, revised 1736), referred to “Lesbians” as women who “loved Women in the same Manner as Men love them”. During that century, references to “Sapphic lovers” and “Sapphist” meant a lady who liked “her own sex in a criminal way”. For centuries before that, comparing a woman to Sappho of Lesbos implied passions that were more than poetic.
Unfortunately we don’t know the origins of the most common queerwords that became popular during the 1930s through 1950s – gay, dyke, faggot, queer, fairy. Dyke, meaning butch lesbian, goes back to 1920s black American slang: bull-diker or bull-dagger. It might go advocate to the 1850s phrase “all diked out” or “all decked out”, meaning faultlessly dressed – in this case, like a man or “bull”. The synonyms faggot goes back to 1914, when “faggots” and “fairies” were said to attend “drag balls”. Nels Anderson in
How ‘gay’ got its rainbow: What once meant merry is now a badge of identity for homosexuals
On Thursday, as the Supreme Court decriminalised homosexuality, reading down the controversial British-era section 377 of the penal code, Mumbai-based Arnab Nandy took to social media to express his pleasure, as many across the country and the world were doing. “I am so Gay today…” he wrote in a coming-out send that has since gone viral. But while Nandy’s preference of word was bang on that day, how did a word that had originally meant light-hearted, carefree or cheerful, become connected with a society whose life has been often been anything but?
The Oxford English dictionary traces the history of the word ‘gay’ to the French word Gai. Merriam Webster takes it further back to a Germanic beginning “akin to the Old High German Gahi” that meant “quick or sudden”. According to both dictionaries, in English the use of ‘gay’ to express happy, excited, merry, carefree or luminous started in the Middle English period that stretches between the 12th and the 16th century.
All For An Identity
While some books and websites on the history of the global gay movement claim the word gay was used as
Today I found out how ‘gay’ came to signify ‘homosexual’.
The word “gay” seems to have its origins around the 12th century in England, derived from the Old French synonyms ‘gai’, which in shift was probably derived from a Germanic word, though that isn’t completely known. The word’s original interpretation meant something to the effect of “joyful”, “carefree”, “full of mirth”, or “bright and showy”.
However, around the early parts of the 17th century, the word began to be associated with immorality. By the mid 17th century, according to an Oxford dictionary definition at the time, the meaning of the word had changed to mean “addicted to pleasures and dissipations. Often euphemistically: Of loose and immoral life”. This is an extension of one of the original meanings of “carefree”, meaning more or less uninhibited.
Fast-forward to the 19th century and the word gay referred to a woman who was a prostitute and a gay man was someone who slept with a lot of women (ironically enough), often prostitutes. Also at this moment, the phrase “gay it” meant t