Gay

Love. Love as in “I love your hair like that”. “Shut up mate, I love KFC”. “Yeah, love it, mate.”

With a background in linguistics, I know it's stupid to pretend I can have any control over English. Like Dr Samuel Johnson wrote, trying to fix English is as foolish as trying to lash the winds. Even words with such inherent power as 'love' can become corrupt and changed over time. But that doesn't mean I can't be pissed off by it.

Gay. Gay as in “ah mate, your phone is gay”. When you spill coffee “ AH, GAY!” I use the word 'love' about a thousand times a day without even thinking about it; am I guilty of the same crime with the word 'gay'?

The word 'gay' has started to offend me; not because of any homosexual connotation, but because people band the word around with, excuse me, gay abandon. Riding home today, some little punk wearing mascara told me my bike was 'gay'. Not being one to back away from confrontation, I squeezed the brakes, turned the bike round and hammered the pedals in the direction of the traffic lights from which the “insult” had issued. I actually didn't consider it an insult; I was just curious. Why was my bike 'gay'? It was simply a collection of welded aluminium and steel; is aluminium and steel welding gay? Was my bike attracted to other bikes of the same gender? If it was, how did this stranger know that, without prolonged and intimate conversation with my bike? My bike never came out to me; was my bike scared of what I might think of it? Had I put too much masculine pressure on it as a young bike? Did my bike have a crush on me? Was my bike male or female? I had no answers, but this punk seemed to have them, because he knew my bike was gay, so I tried to ask him about it.

I swung the gay bike around and asked him directly why my bike was 'gay'. Unfortunately, my curiosity had come across as aggression and he wouldn't tell me why he'd said my bike was gay. In fact, he couldn't answer me because by the time i'd turned my bike around he had disappeared, presumably to hide behind his mum, presumably to call her 'gay' when she was just out of earshot because that's how he obtains his power fix.

This is all very flippant and i'm trying to make a serious point. The truth is, and while i'm very aware that we can't freeze language and that it's organic and ever changing, by throwing around words like 'love' and 'gay', we trivialise them. By overusing them, we erode their significance. Eventually, the words will become absurd.