I found an article on the BBC site a little while ago that I thought was interesting:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7376919.stm
"Campaigners on the Greek island of Lesbos are to go to court in an attempt to stop a gay rights organisation from using the term "lesbian".
The islanders say that if they are successful they may then start to fight the word lesbian internationally.
The issue boils down to who has the right to call themselves Lesbians.
Is it gay women, or the 100,000 people living on Greece's third biggest island - plus another 250,000 expatriates who originate from Lesbos?
The man spearheading the case, publisher Dimitris Lambrou, claims that international dominance of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders, and disgraces them around the world.
He says it causes daily problems to the social life of Lesbos's inhabitants."
If this campaign is successful and we're somehow banned from using the word "lesbian" to refer to anything other than inhabitants of the eponymous Greek isle, what term will we use for homosexual women?
We'll still call them lesbians. Sorry, ??????, you may own the demonym, but the rest of the world owns the word from which it sprung.
I guess Sardinians don't like others being called “sardonic”. Nor do Laconians approve of others receiving the sobriquet “laconic”. And Bulgarians aren't about to lose their precious endonym “bugger“.
If the truth be told (and I think it should) there are far more lesbians in the world than Lesbians. I'll wager a good number of the former are oblivious of the latter. Think of all the signs in bookstores that would have to be redone to accomodate the new law, not to mention the books, the movies, the website gif logos… (not that I would know anything about the lattest). Anyway, folks, this is just another example of language gone awry. Personally, I'm not a lesbian, so I can't speak for the many who are, but this PC thing is getting way out of hand. Actually, it is, by nature, out of hand. Meanings change. Connotations abound. Denotations are a tricky area for blowhards like Dimitris Lambrou. I highly doubt that people generally mean any offense to the inhabitants of Lesbos (or Lésvos, if you like). After all, it's not like the tourism there is dwindling…
What Wordsmith said so well just now. That cat's long out of the bag.
And speaking of cats, should residents of a certain Baghdad suburb demand that we no longer refer to our striped ones as "tabbies"?
(And speaking of tabbies, I lost my 17-year-old one this week to kidney failure. R.I.P., Typo.)
I'm sorry to hear about that; I love cats.