" Modern English starve means 'to die of hunger' (or often 'to be extremely hungry' and dialectally, 'to be very cold'), while its Old English ancestor steorfan meant more generally 'to die.'" Art originally had some very general meanings, mostly connected to 'skill' today, it refers just to certain kinds of skill, chiefly in relation to aesthetic skill - 'the arts.'" "In Old English, mete referred to food in general (a sense which is retained in sweetmeat) today, it refers to only one kind of food ( meat).
(Terry Crowley and Claire Bowern, An Introduction to Historical Linguistics, 4th ed. One example of this is the word indigenous, which when applied to people means especially the inhabitants of a country which has been colonized, not 'original inhabitants' more generally." "Words may come to be associated with particular contexts, which is another type of narrowing. This original meaning is retained, for example, in German, where the word Hund simply means 'dog.' Over the centuries, however, the meaning of hund in English has become restricted to just those dogs used to chase game in the hunt, such as beagles. The word was originally pronounced hund in English, and it was the generic word for any kind of dog at all. The history of the word hound in English neatly illustrates this process. "We say that narrowing takes place when a word comes to refer to only part of the original meaning. (Sol Steinmetz, Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meanings. Other examples of specialization are deer, which originally had the general meaning 'animal,' girl, which meant originally 'a young person,' and meat, whose original meaning was 'food.'" The word litter, for example, meant originally (before 1300) 'a bed,' then gradually narrowed down to 'bedding,' then to 'animals on a bedding of straw,' and finally to things scattered about, odds and ends. happens when a word with a general meaning is by degrees applied to something much more specific.
#Gay definition in old english code#
The word began to be used as a way for queer people to communicate with each other without having to use the word homosexual or any other word that listeners or straight people may be able to interpret.įrom the video: “In an article for The New York Times called ‘The Decline and Fall of the H Word’ Professor George Chauncey notes that uses of ‘gay’ in queer communities often operated as a code so that people could express same-sex desire through language without being picked up on by others who would respond negatively to them.
But now GLAAD lists homosexual as an offensive term in their media reference guide supplementing gay as the appropriate stand-in.”Īround the mid-20th century, use of the word gay to describe homosexuality, primarily for men, became more common practice. The New York Times didn’t adopt the use of gay until 1987, although it still doesn’t use it in all contexts. “However, the shift to using gay in the common language took a bit longer. “The practice of considering queer desire and illness has been denounced by the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association since 19 respectively,” Bainbridge explains. Starting around the 16th century, some early meanings of gay included being “hedonistic” or “frivolous,” and in the 18th century, “gay houses” was another term for brothels (and not necessarily brothels where same-sex relations were happening). Another was ‘noble, fine and excellent.’ Another still was light-hearted.” When did the word gay become associated with sexuality?īefore the word gay was linked to same-sex attraction, it was actually just linked to sexuality in general, heterosexual or homosexual. “One meaning was to be fine or showily dressed. “I did a quick etymology rundown on the word gay and found some now rare and out-of-date uses that are also pretty cool,” says Danielle Bainbridge, who created a video (below) about the history of the word gay. These range from “a person being described as joyous” to also saying that something is “brightly colored.”īut there are also other, lesser-known meanings. Well, the word gay has a variety of uses that date back as far as the 13th century.