I think for this specific one, it was when there needed to be a word for gay people to recognise each other, but without saying what they were in a flagrant way since it wasn't accepted. "Gay", having another, positive meaning, was a great euphemism.
It ended up staying because when people define themselves in a specific way, it makes sense to use that same meaning when talking about them.
Ton-it seems to me that this would promote the idea that if someone says that they are polyamorous-then they are and trying to rename them for your (general your-not you specifically) own comfort of definition is pointless...
I'm more curious as how it ended up meaning "lame" to some people (like, "that book is so gay" or things like that).
Yet another great question. I'd LOVE to hear that one explained in a point-ful manner.What I mean is-someone explain how that was a productive change in the COMMON understanding of the meaning of the word.
I'm pretty sure these two were supposed to be the same thing. In other words, if you were unmarried, you had never had sexual intercourse. So it makes a lot of sense, when the two became separate things, that they each had their own word.
Except that they definitely were not the same. Virgin in the time of Rome meant unwed-it did not mean you hadn't had sex.
But virgin now quite definitely means that you haven't had sex and its meaning has nothing to do with if you were or were not married.
But yeah, language evolves, it's useless trying to control it. What matters is using the words in such a way that other people understand you. If you're the only person who understands what you're saying, you fail at communication.
I agree, very much so.
Unfortunately this is a HUGE issue in relationships-any type of relationships. We all have such different histories and our life experience impacts what we think a word means. This crops up all of the time in day to day life-but even more so on here where so many of us are from different places too. The words that have common meaning where I live-aren't the same words with that common meaning where RP lives for example. And the words that mean one thing here, mean something totally different there.
So we all have to be VERY certain that we understand and accept that it IS different in different places, in different circumstances and we need to allow people the grace to be real in whatever way is "right" where they are in life-not by trying to make them fit our definition.