Stardate 20010804.0722 (On Screen and console): I'm old enough to actually have memories of the language changing. Words which were once mortal insults (like "bastard") become common banter. Common words change meaning, polite terms become impolite and change back to being polite. Some of that is due to the cognitive disconnect sometimes known as "political correctness", which is
the classic confusion of cause and effect. The idea went like this: if there's a word for something which has negative connotations then if we substitute and enforce a different word for that same thing, the connotations will not move over and we'll be able to make everyone think correctly. It don't work that way; words are just tags we use to access concepts, and changing the words doesn't change the concepts. So changing "colored person" to "Negro" to 'black" to "Afro-American" to "African-american" to "people of color" didn't make racism go away. (Racism is going away, slowly, but not because of that.)
But this is about a different word. When I was a kid, "gay" meant "happy". It had nothing to do with sexual persuasion. (When I was a kid no-one was willing to admit in polite society that there was any alternative sexual persuasion.) When I was a young adult, the term came to mean "male homosexual" (and later "any homosexual"), about the time that most people became comfortable with the idea that there were such beasts (without them actually being beasts). But no-one can control language; words mean what they're used to mean and new meanings appear all the time. Language is a work in progress. Kids have now adopted a new meaning for "gay" as a general insult, and I don't think that it has anything to do with sexual persuasion either. It's possible that it derived from that but there's no longer any connection. I'm not sure just where it did come from, really; but in practical use for young people now, saying "that's gay" is similiar to saying "that sucks". The two links given above both contain examples of that usage of the word gay but I've seen plenty of others. I first noticed this maybe two years ago. I suspect the homosexual community will object to this usage, but there's not really a great deal they can do about it. (discuss)
