american english - Does “gay” still include the meaning “merry”?




  • Dictionary.com lists eight meanings of gay, with “merry, lively” as the first entry.




  • Microsoft banned an Xbox user for listing Fort Gay (a real place) as his hometown:



    Xbox Live considered the term gay absolutely inappropriate in any context.





As a non-native English speaker, my question is whether in contemporary English, does gay always mean homosexual? Are British and American English the same in this respect?



Answer



I would say that the word gay means ‘homosexual’ only, with two caveats:



  1. A lot of people, especially young people, use gay as a generic adjective meaning ‘bad’ or ‘lame’. This is, of course, considered inappropriate and rude by polite society, but use of gay in this way is pervasive in situations where there are a lot of young people, such as video gaming communities (like XBox Live).

  2. People are definitely aware that gay used to mean ‘happy’, ‘merry’, or ‘lively’. The theme song to The Flintstones talks about a gay old time, and many people know that this usage at one time was predominant. There is a similar situation with the word queer. Some people might use gay to mean ‘merry’, but only in a tongue-in-cheek or double-entendre kind of way. The Corpus of Contemporary American English, for example, has two examples of “gay old time”, one from 1993, and one from 1994. There is one more example that is from the big screen adaptation of The Flintstones, also released in 1994.


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