Gay "Words",

It is attributed to the Austrian journalist Karl-Marie Kertbeny (1824-1882) the creation of the word “homosexual” the same he used for the first time in one pamphlet of 1869. He wrote in anonymous manner to protest against the law that punished the sodomy. With the word “gay” used as a synonym, was used in the English language since the XII century to refer to the people with lots of happiness. The sexual connotation was acquired at the ends of the XIX century, but to refer to the prostitutes or “women of the happy life”. For men a gay was a conqueror of women, and a gay bar was a brothel. It wasn’t until 1920 when the word was used to refer to the homosexual community, but also was used for heterosexual men “that enjoy the life” or that have certain social appreciation. At the middles of the 60’s decade the word obtained the modern acceptation.

It is interesting how a word is changing through the time. Here is an example. If you look in a dictionary the word “gay” you will find that it is a very happy person, but if you ask a person outside the meaning will be different. This is because the culture is changing and putting new meanings for words. If you travel you can find out that a word could have a different meaning there. I personally have lived it. I then started to think why it is like that. There is a whole vocabulary with different meanings depending on the culture you are. It is quite interesting to know them all, but time will be determinant because new words will have a new social “meaning” while words will have a new social “meaning”. A simple example is our fathers that most of the time they do not know our new vocabulary “meaning”, then they adapted our vocabulary in their vocabulary to be more “new age” people. Interesting.