Deep joy; semantics and etymolgy. Yum, yum and thrice yum.
GF: Sweetums! Good to see you around too!
I kind of doubt it -- originally "gay," as a slang term, meant what we would now call "loose" -- was applied to illicit sex generally. Don't have any scholarly references, but first noticed it in Sarah Waters' novels.
I didn't know this, but you're absolutely spot on;
Gay
In the 19th Century, the term that had originally meant mirthful or joyous acquired a new meaning. Female prostitutes were called (derogatorily) "gay women", and men who were considered playboys were called "gay," too. Early in the 20th Century, some American men and women adopted the word as a label for themselves, preferring it to the clinical "homosexual." The word entered broad use in the 1960s and 1970s as the media responded to gays' demands that the word replace "homosexual" in their news reports. The venerable New York Times held out, but even there, "gay" was ultimately accepted in 1989.
http://www.gaysmokeout.net/
In the seventeenth century the English word gay was used to describe straight (heterosexual) male philanderers. In the nineteenth century it was applied to both men and women who were sexually available or promiscuous. In 1868 the Times, London, complained about how inappropriate it was that the word gay had come to be applied to female prostitutes.
http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/9349/same-sex.html
Hi Jim,
You mention you write SF; do you like Heinlein?
For the record, as stated above, author and researcher John Boswell traced the use of the word "gay" as a noun back to the eleventh century. In his book Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, he writes that the word comes from the Portuguese gai, which meant ‘love outside marriage" until its use over the years became focused to mean "homosexual". Not until the mid 19th century did the word "gay" take on a connotation of gaiety, happiness. It was the straights who "derailed" the word from the gays!
I am very suspicious of that etymology, but you've read the book and I haven't. I say this as I know how easy it is to come up with etymolgies; for example, Cannibal. In The Two Babylons the author asserts this means 'Priest of Baal', and due to their practices came to be the term for someone who ate human flesh. This is completely hooey as the word is from a corrupiton of 'Carribal', one of the tribes of the Carribean the white man wiped out with inadvertant germ warfare.
Likewise the etymolgy I have to hand goes back to 1828 in English showing a 'happy/bright/merry/frivelous' usage (Websters) and shows its origin as the 13th Century old French word 'gai' (happy), which is thought to originate from Frankish. If I had access at work to a decent dictionary I'm pretty sure I could show 'happy' usage way back past 1828. As it is I can find seven uses in Shakespear, five relating to clothing thus meaning 'bright' or 'fancy' in context, another one from Anthony and Cleopatera meaning 'frivelous' in context, and a final one from Othello ("She that was ever fair and never proud,/Had tongue at will and yet was never loud,/Never lack'd gold and yet went never gay," (Othello 2.1.161)) which could be argued to mean 'free sexually' but is probably better defined as 'frivelous, showy' in context. That takes us back to early 15th C with a clear happy/bright/merry/frivelous spread of meaning.
The number of Portugese originated words in use in English is very small, I can't think of one. The number of French originated words in English is very high. English is quite special in that regard as although it is built on a Germanic base (West Germanic I think to be specific), as is German and Dutch, it had heavier intermixes of Norse words and French (by means of the Normans who were French speaking Vikings), and more links to Latin (other than the French ones) through the common convention of creating neologisms using Greek or Latin roots. Thus likihood alone indicates a French origin.
Even taking the Portugese usage of gai in the 11th C as read, one has to accept that the 13th C French usage of gai as 'happy' would have been used by the French speaking classes in England at the time to mean happy. There was little political or social contact with Portugal (other than down a cannon) until the Penninsular War, so unless there are some really good proof of concept it sounds like an overly enthusiastic case of join the dots.
If there are any references showing meanings of gay other than 'happy' or similar in English between 1400 and 1828, I'd love to see 'em.
