Talk Elections

Serious question.

I wouldn't know, since I haven't seen anyone over the age of 12 use that turn of phrase.

I voted yes when I meant to vote no.  I'm an idiot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWS0GVOQPs0

She's lesbian, which makes it so funny.

Situational, like most such things for me. I voted 'Yes' because I've heard it more often in contexts in which the answer is yes than in contexts in which the answer is no.

yes. simple as that.

I find it rather juvenile, but not offending.

Just dumb.

Dude, you are so gay.

It's an offence to language, first of all. English has enough words to describe that.
Be imaginative! Use seldom used words! Take full use of the subtilities of your language!

Not at all, since it's very effective at identifying people who are hopeless idiots. It does me a favor.

I hope I don't get death points for posting this, but I figure it's suitable for this thread:

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Eh?

This thread is so gay it gives me AIDS just reading it.

:P

It's pretty much a dickish thing to do, but it doesn't offend me. Actual homophobia offends me, but 90% of the time the people using it in that context aren't homophobic, just immature. And hey, I have done it many times myself in the past, and alcohol seems to encourage that behavior, at least in my case.

In vino veritas?

It's just so pathetic tbh. Anyone who does this in the current day is a HP.

No, I only have a problem with it when it's done maliciously. Kind of reminds me of this:

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/254823/bike-curious

More like In vino stupidas.....or In vino "that's gay dude".

Such thing doesn't happen in France, then no. Maybe more in beero veritas, or something like that...

In France quand t'es un pédé ou un enculé, can also mean you're a guy that did a tricky/betraying thing.

Quand t'es une tantouze, une tapette, ou une tarlouze, can mean you're a freaking coward person which is barely worth a girl.

And that's all, no connection between homosexuality and idiocy here.

Enjoy the most popular French synonyms for 'fag'.

Enculé is the less offensive and became very commonly used, can even be something you tell friendly. Even became something you can tell to express your admiration/surprise/astonishment/stuffs like that, especially around Marseille: En-cu-lééééé.

Pédé is already less nice, but still became quite common, slightly more aggressive than enculé, and less commonly friendly told.

Tapette, tarlouze, and tantouze, well, depends on the tone and the context, can be quite insulting to friendly.

Now I think I'm pretty easy going, but The word "f****t" does bother be quite a bit.

Oh no, I totally agree. I'm more offended by the word "f****t" than I ever will be of the slang usage of "gay." For me, "gay" does not inherently carry bad connotations. It's a sexual orientation by definition. However, "f****t" is inherently a slur, meant to offend. I just found the graph kinda funny. Sorta cuz it's true.

Yes, this

Yeah. I think the platonic Form of English, so to speak, is more offended than most people are by this sort of thing.

Ive never heard that used that way

I never heard it used non-ironically. Too stupid to be really offensive.

Benoit: It would be "in cervisia veritas", then. Like in cervoise (see Asterix) or cervesa, for people liking vacations in Mexico/Cuba/Dominican Republic.

I would like to add than enculé isn't only Marseillais. I know a guy from Ariège which use it all the time.

I tend to not get offended by 'words' but how the words are expressed.

'f****t' as a word offends me for the reasons you state - it's a personal slur. However, I saw my cousin and his friends 16-17 years old and they were throwing 'gay' in there meaning stupid. I warned them at University to avoid using that. But I don't think it's something should be encouraged... the etymology of words can skew off into weird places in a short period of time.

I mean, look at the word 'gay', it only took 30 years for gay to stop meaning 'happy' to mean 'homosexual'...

I tend not to get offended by words at all, cuz I just don't think that words are harmful.

Of course there's also plenty of definitions for different words, "f****t" and "fag" especially. However, because I live in America, I don't hear it used in that context very often.

I used to do this a lot but now generally don't/try not to.  I'm not offended by it.

How could this not be offensive?

(though my disgust at the term is only partly motivated by my offended feeling - it is also due to the age of the offenders.  I dislike all those know-nothing young people)

Indeed, but well, let's be inventive, and if I had cervoise in the mind, I hadn't the Latin one anymore.


It is indeed Francewide, but in Marseille and around it became like a daily normal word, then mostly used in the Southern half of France (lol seems the word sticks to places where the southern accents are the most marked, Ariège is one), and then to a lesser extent the rest of France.

Offended?  no.  But it is stupid though.


Using "gay" to describe "gay" things is ok though......"Dude, that scarf is gay!"

Enculé is less offensive than f****t? I'd have thought that considering it's a quite,..., uhm, plastic description, it might be about equally (non-)offensive?

I think it is was more offensive, yet, it is very used, in a non-malicious way.

None of my friends use it, but sometimes I meet people who talk like this, which generally guarantees that I will not be having further conversations with them voluntarily.

Yes, a lot. I'm surprised so much people still find it cool to talk that way.

Though it's norwhere as bas as refering to heterosexuals as "straight". This is outright unacceptable.

Really? I hear gay people use the word straight all the time.

One more time it can depend on the tone and the context (as always), as I said in the 1st post about that it can be offensively used, but as MaxQue said, it also really became a widespread word used mostly in unoffensive context (the evolution of the use of that word is interesting though).

Still, the idea behind such a word is pretty clear.

I'm actually really confused by this. I use 'straight' all the time. It actually has a negative connotation?

I guess the non-straights are crooked or twisted or something? I don't think etymology is all that important in determining whether words are offensive or not.

Yeah, that was the point. But no, it's not an etymological issue considering the word straight is AFAIK still used in english with its original meaning.

No, it's not. It's used to mean heterosexual, not implying that gay people are weird. Otherwise, gay people obviously wouldn't use it.

A word can change meaning even when referring to the same thing - that's how slurs usually work. A word like negroe is offensive not because of its etymological roots but because of how it ended up being used.

I usually just say, "Yo, that is so homosexual!"

I would perfer the word gay go back to it's original meaning.  It used to be a perfectly good word. Same thing for the word fag.

Can "straight" not be used anymore in contemporary English to mean what it's supposed to mean ?

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Negro isn't generally considered offensive, just old-fashioned.  It's the other n-word that's offensive.

...I don't hang out with people that talk that way.

WHAT

Yes, people who do that are retarded.

Seriously though? Not really.

There isn't really such a thing as "supposed to mean" in language. But many words have more than one meaning. That doesn't really say much.

Ernest, then that's a difference between Swedish and English. The basic point still stands. You could apply it to the n-word as far as I know as well.

It means that I voted no.

Although, to be honest, I usually hear the word gay used as a synonym for homosexual, and not as a synonym for stupid.  Or I hear it as a synonym for happy.  In my mind, "Don we now our gay apparel" puts me in mind of wearing festive, bright colors.  Santa Claus hats.  Not dunce caps.  But maybe you and I listen to different songs.

Still, I can't say that the use of the word "gay" to mean things other than "happy" strikes me as particularly offensive.  Chacun a son langue, n'est-ce pas?


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WHERE ARE YOU GETTING THESE GIFS FROM OMFG

Oh, I've discovered animated Hitler gifs.  How cool is that?

Yeah, I'm probably going to be very annoying for the next few days.

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(there are some that I was tempted to post in the masturbation thread, but those would surely yield infraction points--a huge wad of them, if you know what I mean.  I'll leave you to search for yourself.)

Sa langue, angus, not son langue.

Apparently, someone decided than a tongue was female.

Quote of the day.

I don't lose sleep over it, but I can see how somebody could be offended by it.  It would be like saying the pawn store guys "Jewed" you out of money or something like that.  Or saying that somebody "goes Irish" on illegal substances.

So yeah, on a rhetorical level I understand how some people could find that offensive.

I tend to use ethnicities as verbs and adjectives, but in a stereotyped sense. I know it's wrong, but it's funny every once and a while. For instance, when I need a ride somewhere and I have to ask a friend, I say "Can I Jew a ride out of you?" or when I see someone treating someone else unfairly, I say that they're going American on them. Or when someone is just completely irrelevant to anything I do, I call them Canadian.

OH GOD PLEASE DON'T INFRACT ME PLEASE I AM BUT A MERE TEENAGER

*yawn* OK, I'll reformulate.

Can you say, in English, in 2012, "a straight line" ?

If the answer is yes, your point doesn't stand.

I think Antonio was trying to say that gay people don't use "straight" the way straight people use "gay"--as a synonym for stupid. I personally have never heard a gay person say "Ugh I hate work...it's so straight!" or "it's so hetero!"

(because we all know gay people have more class than straight people, fact.)

I meant that I find the use of a word like "straight" to qualify heterosexuals to be pretty disparaging toward homosexuals, by suggesting that heterosexuality is the straight practice and that others are deviant.

"straight" has definitely changed in my lifetime.  Well, it has always meant the shortest distance between two ordered pairs on a Cartesian co-ordinate system grid, technically, but in the vernacular it always meant "doesn't get high" or "isn't cool about it" back in the 80s.  Like, oh, dude, there's my brother, he's straight.  Put out that spliff and open a window quick!  Nowadays, straight more often means heterosexual. 

Gay, on the other hand, has always meant either happy (as in "Don we now our gay apparel") or homosexual (as in, my brother's gay, so stop trying to set him up with your sister.)  It can also mean effeminate (as in, dude, that French press is so gay, why don't you just buy a coffee maker?)  Maybe that's the way the kids are using the term nowadays to mean stupid.  Then again, what does stupid really mean?  Either way, I wouldn't worry too much if the word gay is being used to mean homosexual or stupid.  This is slang.  You know, the Brits objected to Curious George back in the 1940s, when H. A. Rey first published it in New York, so he didn't catch on in the UK the way he did in the US.  Why?  Because, of course, the word "curious" was 1940s UK slang for homosexual (or effeminate).  These slang phrases are just what they are.  Don't loose too much sleep over it.

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I think you are being "more catholic than the Pope" here. No gay person seems to be annoyed by that use of straight, yet, you seem outraged by it.

Maybe that's because I'm not a native English speaker... Anyways, if "droit" were used that way in French I'd be pretty outraged by such a word, I think.

How surprising, given that it's opposite, gauche, has always been used as a synonym for general awkwardness. 

That's right, but the sense of droit can vary according to the context, and here it's indeed used like 'straight', not like 'right', as in right/left hands, the contrary would be tordu (twisted) here.

I understand Antonio's meaning, and as a French speaker it always sounded odd to me too, and made me wonder about some eventual underlying things, but well, I wouldn't know enough about the culture that produced it to bring a judgment. In France you mainly have hétéro, hétérosexuel, and, homo-homosexuels, the world 'gay' is more and more taking over here too though, which I find annoying.

That wouldn't be an isolated case, and not reserved to the English language, on the same line than Antonio's reasoning, one can also wonder why the direction of the 'not left hand' has been called droit, which also mean right, Right, or straight, would mean left-handed people are twisted?! Discrimination (or well, jealousy) toward us!

Ditto. Especially because it's causing the rapid exctinction of the very nice word "gai" (cheerful, joyful).



It's even made worse when you think in political terms. ;)

I'm sadly guilty of using the word gay in such a sense, though largely on a natural, off-the-cuff expression of anger or frustration. I can't restrain it, like I can't restrain a lot of things I say in such cases. I know it's bad, but I'm a bad person when I'm angry and I use lots of words which I shouldn't use. Thankfully, I'm correcting my bad habits by preferring the use of 'Christophe Colomb' in those contexts. There certainly is no moral issue in using that genocidal maniac's name in fits of rage or anger.

Using the word 'gay' is that context is still bad and all, but I find people who go on a crusade about it to be annoying. My high school did that, and it was self-defeating (the associated crusade against `f****t`was understandable, though). I doubt that most people who use 'gay' in that context mean intentional harm or express homophobia. I know I don't gay. Gay people are great people, and are in most cases nicer and more classy than heteros.