I'm always listening to snippets of other people's conversations, which mostly gives me interesting ideas, information and inflections. Mostly. Sometimes it just makes me want to rant. And this, I'm afraid, is one of those occasions.
If my overhearings had been in a situation where I was a tutor or a parent, I could take on the conversers themselves.
But no, I was accidentally eavesdropping over the weekend papers, on adults, which left me on shakier ranting ground, though I would've liked to take them on all the same.
You may not think they said much of any rantable consequence.
The gist of it went something like this: ''Have you seen this Black Friday shopping thing? Punching someone to get to a cheap television? That is so gay.''
I studied them over the top of my newspaper.
Using my own powers of sweeping judgement, I decided neither of them looked particularly like etymological experts, so they probably weren't using the word ''gay'' ironically in its 14th-century incarnation of carefree and joyous.
They arguably weren't referring to the slightly later meaning of ''addicted to pleasures'' (although I can imagine how a large cheap TV would help ameliorate a serious dependence on Downton Abbey) and they almost certainly weren't considering the showy-ness of large televisions as a gay display in the same sort of way we sing ''don we now our gay apparel'' in that Christmas carol.
They turned from World to Sports, the throwaway comment forgotten, trashed.
But I was still seething.
Pretty sure they weren't using the phrase ''so gay'' to denote that the TV shoppers rated highly on Alfred Kinsey's 1948 scale of sexuality (or other, more complex, scoring models by Storm and Klein that followed).
Or as any sort of observation on shoppers' individual sexualities at all.
They were shopping. And punching. Not shagging.
There is nothing latently or blatantly homosexual about buying a television.
No.
What they meant was ''so gay'' as in ''so lame'', which has become such a common catch phrase here that websites write about New Zealand's ''low-level homophobia'' as an established fact and our prime minister feels just fine calling out a radio host's ''gay red top'' on air.
Even his apology was piercing: sorry, but gay just means weird and that's something I picked up from my kids and I didn't mean to offend anyone.
Of course.
Yes, I know the gay red top thing's old news: it's not even lining this year's compost bins.
But not if you're growing up or going out gay in a country where the implied correlation is that being gay means being weird and somehow wrong; then, it's still news now. And now. And now.
It's news to me every day I hear people so thoughtlessly, sweepingly disparage other people.
A long way from joyous; as an institutionalised phrase, it's so unkind.
And where does a throwaway ''so gay'' tickle become a gay bash?
At any level, it's not all right.
It's not new that the word ''gay'' has had pejorative overtones.
A century ago, a gay woman was a descriptor for a prostitute and ''carefree and uninhibited'' were hardly always desirable character traits in a society so straight.
See where we got the terminology?
That linguistic trajectory is a classic example of how we can change the language we use by the way we use it, and so transform our world.
I can think of some words and phrases that we've so successfully stamped out as a society that I couldn't even print them on this page.
And I can only hope we live in a better place for it.
We're all part of how we all use language. We're all evolving (or not) together.
I wish I'd put down my newspaper, walked over to those guys and tutored/parented them about what was on my mind.
Then perhaps I wouldn't feel the need to rant on now.
Though I think we all need to get a lot more intolerant of thoughtless intolerance for anything to change.
Because calling things ''so gay'' is so, so worse than lame.
- Liz Breslin
