(Bumped for the excellent dialogue. Later posts below…)
Adorable Child (AC) is growing up; Polimom is no longer the center of her universe… which means that via her friends, other parenting styles and value-systems are making their way into our lives.
Some of these differences manifest superficially (but Mom, Janie has a cell-phone!), some show up in privileges (but Mom, Janie gets to stay up ’til 10!), and others — far more subtle — pop up in her language:
Polimom: AC, you will not be able to go to Janie’s house until you finish cleaning your room and bathroom.
AC: But I can finish it tonight when I get back! It’s almost done!
Polimom: No, AC. You’ve had all morning to finish this, and you chose instead to draw / play on the computer / watch tv (pick your favorite).
AC: But Mom! I told her I’d be there. This is so gay!!!
Polimom: Do you mean gay… happy? or gay…. homosexual?
AC: (long pause…) I mean gay… stupid.
Ah.
Lest ye think a turnip truck dropped Polimom off at the corner near our house yesterday, let me assure you that I knew exactly what she meant. Furthermore, she knows that while the word “gay” has multiple meanings in our Webster’s unabridged, “stupid” is not one of them.
Evidently we’re working out of different dictionaries these days.
Polimom’s coming up against some external cultural influences — or rather, AC is. While the socialization process (particularly for girls) includes painful internal sorting and pecking, I’m a tad confused about where those other nine- and ten-year-olds are coming up with some of this…. because no matter how hard I try, I can’t visualize a dinner-table conversation at anyone’s house that covers the subject.
Janie’s Mom: Janie, you’ll need to stay home tomorrow afternoon to work on your project. It’s due at the end of the week.
Janie: But Mom, that’s not fair! I made plans with my friends for tomorrow!
Janie’s Mom: Janie, I’m sorry to be so gay about this, but school comes first.
Hmmm…. that just doesn’t flow, somehow.
So how does this type of attitudinal influence creep into the lives of our children? I’d go for the “they got it from their older siblings” possibility, except that doesn’t explain where they came up with it. Is it the media? School? Church? The water?
Polimom has tried hard to raise a non-judgmental child, and we’ve worked the various “us v. them” spectrum fairly widely all her life — from religion, to ethnicity, to sexuality. On the whole, I feel pretty good about how she’s doing, but this type of language usage is extremely subtle, and it carries implications that bother me.
Thus far, I’ve been able to rely on Webster’s to correct some of these oddities; AC and every one of her friends know where we keep the dictionary, and they use it regularly. No doubt they think I’m a bit nuts, but they’d have thought so anyway…
However — speaking purely as a parent to others… would you please give me a hand here? You need to be listening to how your kids are using words, so I can stop lugging my unabridged dictionary around everywhere I go. The thing weighs over ten pounds, and I’m getting worried about my back… and about the societal undercurrents.
There’s more going on here than pre-teen oddness.
Polimom,
Perhaps this source of wisdom can help:
Yes, indeed; the question is which is to be master! 😉
PM, sorry to say this, but I think you (and I, and others) are seeing the language (or at least how we use it) evolving here. When I was a (not-so) AC, the word “gay” meant “happy” – its use as a reference to homosexuality was just coming into vogue (at least where I lived – the slang term in use at that time was “queer”) as I entered high school. I have heard this term used in the context you describe by my own AC (male) – and he ‘defined’ it in a very similar fashion.
My guess is that when they use it in the context of “stupid” or “silly” they are referring obliquely to their perception of stereotypical “gay” behavior (I am talking about the real over-the-top stuff here – exaggerated movements and speech inflections, etc.), and over time the word was taken on this new meaning.
I guess the best way to deal with it is to ensure that you continue to teach AC about the values you want her to grow up with, and not hammer her too hard on the use of slang terms (though certain words still carry enough of an inflammatory meaning that they may justify a washing-of-the-mouth-with-soap or other such punishment.) It certainly doesn’t hurt to remind her that words have meaning, they can be hurtful, and it is impossible to recall them once spoken.
~EdT.
Well, if you are raising AC to respect others, one approach might be to say, “Don’t you think using ‘gay’ for ‘stupid’ is pretty mean to people who are gay? Would you want to insult somebody who heard you?”
But this usage has been around at least since I was a kid, so I don’t expect it to go away anytime soon.
Oh, and to Ed’s point – I think he’s exactly right, thisis not a change in meaning, it’s a reference to gay as it’s commonly understood at the moment. (that is, we’re not seeing one meaning replace another, as happens regularly in language.)
Which is what makes is an objectionable usage.
It’s new meaning, not uncommon, BTW, could be partially created as a reaction to the TV version of gayness: smarter, funnier, happier, and way more cool than straight people.
Kids, who generate these new words and uses, are instinctively aware of how they’re being played and react to counter the spin. I’d say it’s entirely normal and, unfortunately, a sign of homosexuality’s moving closer to the end of the hate-tolerate-accept cycle that we applies to “others”.
Hi there. Grandma here.
When my AC was in HS, being gay was trendy. She came home one night with Michelle, a wonderful girl who looked like a 12 yr old boy. My AC walked in, told her dad and me that she was gay, looked at us expectantly. We said, okay, no problem, however if you’re doing this to be trendy please understand that Michelle’s heart can be broken as easily as Johnnie’s last week, and you better be willing to walk your talk because it can be dangerous out there. She was furious. She had not expected tolerance and acceptance, she was totally hoping to leave us aghast, she pitched a hissy because we weren’t sufficiently outraged in her view. She dated Michelle for a couple months, then went back to her heterosexual relationships and she and Michelle remained friends.
Fast forward, 10+ yrs. She is now married to a total schmuck, living in our house, all three of them, him, her and our AGC (adorable grandchild). Our grandson is six, in first grade, way too smart for his own good, and terribly sensitive when he’s not being a 6 yr old insensitive kid! He stunned us last week when he came home telling us of some trash talking on the playground. He said, “This guy said this, and that guy said that, and I said, You sound just like a Catholic.” He was laughing belly hard at this point.
My husband and I looked at each other, asked him to repeat it to be sure we’d heard it right, then asked him what he meant by that. Being six, he had no idea why he’d said that actually. He said, “Well, he was acting like a Catholic.” I asked what does a Catholic act like? (BTW, both sides of his family were raised Catholic but religion isn’t something we talk about much here, we tend to talk values and tolerance rather than dogma.) He shrugged, said he didn’t know, it didn’t mean anything, etc. I told him that he had to rethink using that term because he could hurt someone’s feelings without meaning to. He said okay, but really has no idea what he was saying (and this in New Orleans, for heaven’s sake!)
I’m with you, Poli, WHERE did that come from? And what the hell does it mean?
On that note, I also agree that there is an evolution of language that each generation adds to. I mean, come on, for us cool and hot mean the same thing right?
Anyone got a clue about the Catholic thing?
I know I heard other kids use the term gay to mean stupid, or silly, or dumb in school. I don’t remember it exactly in elementary school, but by middle school it was there. Without hesitation I even thought that I have heard it on TV used that way, but not often enough to say where exactly.
Couldn’t really pin it down for you where the use of this word came from for stupid, probably because it is so common. And when I think of it, even kids in high school that I think of as being rather educated and not free with curse words used that word like that. Probably anyone you heard use it would either not care or had not thought about it if you asked them about its possible derogatory meaning towards homosexuals. It has become like any other slang term, it doesn’t have a dictionary meaning, just one that is understood.
I agree with Ed’s idea and I would say that it is very accurate as to how gay was chosen in the first place. Look at how gay people are portrayed on TV when it is meant to be funny that someone turns out to be gay, such as on Saturday Night Live. Even MTV shows a more extreme presentation of gay people that overall just comes off as ”silly”. So in a transitive way it goes from being used to mean silly, to dumb, and then stupid I guess.
But I also think of it as having been used when someone has done something mean or unfair, not necessarily dumb. I think of someone in school telling me their new project assignment that has an “unfair” part to it and the reaction of sympathy to that person is, “that’s gay.” So now, the use is not just that something is stupid, but that it doesn’t make sense. Which follows more closely to public perception of homosexual people. Most people do not think of them as stupid, even the way they are shown on TV. But you could find people that just do not think they make sense. Just a guess.
This entire discussion reminds me of the secret racist code words post I did some months ago. I’m starting to conclude that I just grew up in a bubble and didn’t know it!
I’m gonna take your word for it that this usage has been around for awhile, but I’m having trouble seeing it as harmless. The way we use language is an extremely subtle, but reliable, marker for societal attitudes, and a word’s passage into slang doesn’t mean that the “new” meaning isn’t a reflection on the old (imho).
Oh — and Slate — the “Catholic” thing is way out of left field to me.
Oh damn! And I was so counting on you to have the explanation! It’s left field to me too, but now I’m so curious I want to find out how he arrived at it! Thought maybe since you are a current parent, and of course, given you are always wise, you’d know.
On the use of “Catholic” I do not claim to know what the context was fully when it was used, but I venture to say that replace it with “Baptist” and I have heard that used then. Not used as, “that’s Baptist of you”, my grandparents used it differently, but what I mean is that it sounds like a variation on an old phrase, not a new one. My family is not Baptist or Catholic, so maybe if you are then it would be an even farther stretch to understand it.
Well I’ll be damned. I go to pick up the grandson tonight and he’s grinning. Apparently he and a little girl at his table are good friends. He tells me that a boy, who’s a friend of his, “said me and S are gay.” He was smiling wide when he said it.
I was dumbfounded after this conversation today. So we sat down on a step in the Quarter and talked about it. He said it must meant they were good friends and it was a nice thing to say.
He’s SIX. How on earth do I explain this to him? I told him that some people might get hurt feelings by that word because it has a lot of different meanings. That seemed to suffice for the moment. We’ll see.
I online game..and the term “gay” means stupid. In that context..It has no demeaning purpose towards gay people. It’s just a term that has been around.
They say timing is everything, Slate! LOL
Since that’s pretty much what I remember telling AC on the subject at age six, too, I’d say you gave a good answer. Which reminds me… one of these days, I need to do a post about the evils of IM’ing — even with “friends” (kids say the darndest things…)