Originally Posted by
pacificaslim
I'd ride that bike if it were my size. Looks great to me!
But I must disagree with the stuff above about "that's so gay." That term does not (at least not exclusively) mean "*****exual". Not by a long shot. It doesn't mean "stupid" either. If you look at the cases it is most commonly used in, I believe people are often using it to describe a certain overly tacky, showy, over-the-top, inauthentic style. You know, a kind of affectation. For whatever reason, this style seem quite common in the gay community - been to a parade lately? - (and maybe that's how the word gay ended up being used for *****exuals anyway).
So...while I am totally in support of the idea of a man being free to love another man and be entitled to the legal protections and rights normally granted to other couples, I don't see how any of us have the right to not be criticized for what amounts to our fashion choices. It may or may not be nice, but it's certainly nothing worth getting upset over.
Or maybe not. I don't use the term anyway and discourage it, but from a language analysis standpoint, I think I've figured out why it is used and that has nothing to do with discriminatory feelings towards *****exuality itself.
If you're a teenage boy, you use it to mean "stupid." My son uses it to mean "happy," since he's six and all the old kid's books used it in that context. I've never heard it used as you describe it, which would at least make more sense in the context of say, Miami Beach. But my students definitely use it to mean "stupid." When I assign them extra homework over the weekend, they are not protesting the campiness of said homework, or its garish nature
. Nor is that what they mean when another kid shows up wearing an out-of-date pair of tennis shoes, or with a dorky haircut. It's a put-down, meaning "dumb" or "stupid" or objectionable in some sense. I've never heard a kid use it to mean overly campy.
I guess they might say a pink bike was "gay," and mean it in the sense you're describing, but then they clearly mean: "resembling something a *****exual would use, in my 14 year-old limited understanding of the universe, where all *****exuals resemble Nathan Lane or Adam Lambert." Mostly they mean "stupid."
Uh, and it's blue anyway, which is not usually a girly color, even that shade.