That's so gay

I watched a YouTube video a while back that really got my goat, not because it says "don't say gay" and I like saying gay. Just because to prove what a terrible person you are for saying gay, it uses a really inaccurate analogy. This isn't the lover of the evolution of a language in me talking (though he enjoyed this post as well) this is the semanticist in me talking.


In the case that the people use "gay" in both these videos, it's being used as an adjective. "That top is gay" could have just as easily been said "That top is blue", you know, adjectives. Now they then say, something like that's like saying, that top is so 'girl wearing a skirt as a top'". Bad analogy. "Gay" functions both as a noun and an adjective. 'Girl wearing a skirt as a top" is only a noun, and therefor can't be used as an accurate substitution in this case. Well nouns can be used as adjectives (I call them adjectivized nouns, even though that's not a real term) gay in the cases presented in this video do not represent said "adjectivized nouns" they are simple adjectives. While the denotation of the sentence doesn't change, the connotation changes immensely.


A more correct analogy would be like saying "shoot man, that car is so white!" You could understand many different things from that sentence, the first is that the car is in fact white in color, another is that the car is something that the speaker relates heavily to something else it deems "white" a "white person" something very clean, or the inside of an Oreo (maybe the car was parked between two very large tires). Admittedly this too isn't the best analogy, but at least it's semantically correct. The difficulty comes from the already ambiguous and multi-faceted connotation of the word gay (if Middle English is to be appealed to at all).


To accurately process something that someone says, the key elements to consider are not the audience's understanding of the sentence, but rather the context, and the speaker's understanding of the word, and most importantly, the speaker's understanding of the audiences understanding of the word.


The moral of the story is, Hilary and Wanda were not only semantically incorrect in their assessment of the individual conversations, but showed a lack of understanding of denotative language, in that those being confronted probably never had the noun "gay" in mind when using its adjective form, just as someone who calls a very unattractive, silver colored car "white", may not be trying to offend me, a white person, but may simply be saying it reminds them of the inside of an Oreo which, as their experience would dictate, is also what they commonly associate with the word. The damning facet of language is, it is only useful to the extent that it succeeds in relaying a thought or concept to another person. If language misses it's mark, blame the person for the thought, or the language for its inability to relate it, but just as you shouldn't and don't blame good language for a poor thought, you can't condemn a well intended thought for the language by which it's expressed.