There’s a campaign being launched called Think B4 You Speak, which is a very gay title. I point this out ironically, because of course the whole point of this campaign is to get people to stop using the word “gay” to mean lame or retarded. To be honest I think it’s lame that the campaign focuses on “gay” without mention of another common pejorative “retarded”, since the latter seems much harsher and more dismissive to me.

I have on occasion casually referred to a thing as either gay or retarded, and I know that on a subset of these occasions my words have caused offense and that I wished I had chosen them better. But starting a campaign to try to curb usage of a word? That seems like a really shitty idea to me. Also, the direction of the campaign seems kind of backwards… the PSAs (see the website) involve bland teenagers pointing out that something is “so gay” and then being scolded by a reasonably famous person who goes on to draw painful analogies like “how would you like it if someone who thought this pepper shaker was stupid said it was so 16-year-old-with-a-bad-moustache?” … WTF?

And if there really must be a campaign, why not attack it head-on and instead ask “What exactly is it about that pepper shaker that evokes homosexuality?”

I totally get that if you were to replace the word “gay” with a racial or gendered epithet it would suddenly become much less ok, but I don’t think there’s a true equivalence in that. The word “gay” connotes behavior and attitude as well as sexual identity. Its original meaning already implied a silliness and lack of cool before it was adopted as a term for sexuality, and I don’t think this can be ignored when looking at current usage. To me “gay” is a useful word to mean the opposite of “cool”, in a way that “uncool” cannot be used.

Eg if a friend says something that’s not particularly cool and I tell them that it’s uncool, it’s like I’m censuring them… and I would expect them to be hurt by this. But if I say it is gay, I am really just implying they have failed in their attempt at coolness and am poking fun at them.

Maybe American kids use the word differently than I do, but this is the thing with language… it moves, it changes, and trying to clamp down on a particular usage of a particular word seems like a bit of a pointless exercise.