How did the word gay come to mean both “lighthearted” and “homosexual”? In the late 1800s, the term gaycat was used in hobo culture to refer to an inexperienced hobo who might take on an older mentor for help, often another male. Over time, there was a convergence between gay as slang for “homosexual” and “gay” from the French term for “happy.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Changing Meanings of Gay”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Marty from Philadelphia.
Hello, Marty, welcome.
Hey there, what’s up?
Oh, well, I just kind of have a question that’s been mulling in my mind in light of all the current events.
And the current event I’m talking about is President Obama’s evolving on same-sex marriage and becoming that cover on Time magazine where it’s called the first gay president.
And I just thought back to my, when I was a young preteen, I went to see a movie called Our Hearts Were Young and Gay.
It had Dorothy Gish in it and some old famous almost silent movie people in it.
And the word gay, it’s just ordinary, you know, a word we used to mean happy.
And so I guess my question is, when exactly did the word gay stop meaning merry or pleasant and happy and start meaning homosexual?
Well, there can be some overlap.
The gay gay?
Okay.
And another part of the question I was thinking of was, why gay?
Why not, again, cheerful or merry or some other word?
How did that happen?
All right, let’s break this down.
It’s pretty simple.
The research that’s been done on this is very solid.
Talking about gay happy, English gets it from French.
It shows up in the 1300s, meaning merry or jolly or that sort of thing.
And it continues to be used in this way in English for a very long time, for centuries and centuries.
But then in the late 1800s, hobo culture arises on the rail lines and the railroads of the United States.
Now, the reason this is relevant is that the culture also had this big body of slang.
And this slang kind of seeped out to the wider world through railroad journals, through linguists and people who were interested in language.
They’re just kind of like the passing fancy of the journalists who would like to write about these odd folks who would travel from coast to coast on the rails.
One of the terms that they used was a term gay cat. G-A-Y-C-A-T or G-E-Y-C-A-T.
Sometimes one word, sometimes two.
And now this term had a lot of meanings.
Like a lot of slang, it moved fast.
It shifted meaning.
For example, one of the uses of gay cat was somebody who would go into town and actually get work from time to time, which true hobos never did.
They considered it beneath them to ever work.
But these people would sometimes, you know, go in and chop wood or go in and wash dishes and make a little money.
But also, part of the gay cat culture was they tended to be inexperienced hobos, inexperienced at traveling and providing for themselves.
So oftentimes, they would take an older, more experienced hobo as a mentor.
And there was always the assumption that these gay cats were actually the sexual partners of these older hobos.
And that there was a one-to-one relationship there between two men, because it was almost always men.
And therefore, by the 1950s, gay cat broke apart.
Cat, of course, started to be used fairly regularly in the 30s and 40s just to mean guy or dude or man or something like that.
And gay broke off of gay cat and started just to refer to men who were homosexual.
And you can see it pop up in fiction and news reports of, you know, the police raiding gay bars and that sort of thing in the 1950s.
And by the 1960s, gay, meaning homosexual, is firmly entrenched in English.
And, of course, move fast forward to the 90s and gay starts to mean weird or unusual or quirky or odd.
Oh, like that’s so gay.
Yeah, that’s so gay.
But the other question you’ve got is the one which I really love, and it’s something that people often forget to ask, is, well, what happened to gay meaning Mary?
And the thing is, it’s called semantic collision.
It’s when you have two words, and English is filled with examples of this, two words from different environments, different etymological sources that come together and occupy a space in the language where they’re easy to confuse.
Where if I say we went to a gay party last night, you could either think I had a really married time or you can think that everyone there was a homosexual.
So this semantic collision means I need to push one of those words out of my vocabulary and stop using it.
Well, sort of like queer.
Yeah.
Queer is the same way with queer.
Exactly.
We rarely use queer anymore to mean quirky or odd or freaky or weird.
So that’s the history of gay as we know it today.
And it’s a really interesting question, probably one that comes up a dozen times a year.
So I’m glad to talk to you about it, Marty.
Yeah, Marty.
Well, thank you.
Thank you so much.
I really feel very well educated, and I will share my wealth of knowledge with all my friends and relatives.
And I thank you for that.
Thanks, Marty.
Bye-bye.
Excellent.
Bye, Marty.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
