Moronic Oxymorons
In the same week I've had two instances where I've run across nouns that seem to have lost all of their meaning. In the first, a friend who just got back from Scotland was complaining that he was...
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crossing over from the recent "sub-normal" thread, it would appear that the word "special," as it is applied to people with differing mental or physical abilities, could heading down that track. I...
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Gay is another example. When I were a lass it was used solely in the context of happy. There must be hundreds of others which elude me right now.
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"Gay" is a bit different in that it existed as a slang term in the homosexual community for decades before the mainstream took note of it. It doesn't really fit in the euphemism category--although it...
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the thing about "gay" is that in one fell swoop it made a million corny love songs socially awkward.even long after it had passed out of daily speech, workaday songwriters and poets were using it...
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Hijacked words?Well, "fag" comes to mind...At least in some social circles (guess which!?) ya can't refere to multiple spheres as "balls" w/out getting guffaws -- "cock" comes in fer similar bufoonery...
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Actually, "special" has problems of its own, divorced from the "retarded" connotation. These days, folks say "Ah, you're so special!" in a barbed, ironic sense to someone who either has gotten, or...
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Lent comes to mind. The last citation in the OED for "lent" as the season between winter and summer was late 14th century; the first for "spring" was mid 16th. We limped along for almost 200 years...
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