ABBC Newsbeat survey of young people under 29 has recently revealed that 47% of them believe that the phrase "that's gay" is acceptable to be broadcast on television. My question is what problems does this cause in English?
Firstly, LGBT activists may feel as if this phrase is discriminatory against gay people because it compares them to something bad, awful, or unfortunate in this phrase. However, this is not the case because 44% of the same participants in the Newbeat survey said they never use this phrase themselves, while a further 31% said they rarely use it. Therefore, young people's usage of this phrase is in fact very low.
In addition, the same participants believed that clearly discriminatory and offensive words against the LGBT community were definitely unacceptable to be broadcast on TV. 85% also agreed that the word homosexual was acceptable.
The conclusion? This is not an LGBT rights issue. It is a language issue. And it is a language issue on three levels.
First of all, youth across the world feel a need to be innovative and creative and this doesn't stop with language. If we look back to when we were children, we can also remember times when we used new words like 'chav' and 'emo' to distinguish different groups of people, and even now young people have started to use words like 'twerk' or 'sick' (meaning good). Therefore we should not be surprised that this phrase has been created.
Secondly, language inevitably changes over time and we cannot predict what will happen to it in the future... what words will be lost and what words will change in meaning completely. I have more on this coming in my next video!
And on the third language issue level, we can say that some words are exceptionally unstable in meaning. Think how the words 'wicked' and 'queer' have changed meaning recently along with the word 'gay'. We only need to go back to the 1960s, just 50 years ago, to see a completely different meaning for the word 'gay', where it meant happy and joyous. Soon after, the homosexual community took possession of this word to describe their own and now they are worried that the word is changing meaning again and that this change in meaning reflects some intolerance towards gay people. This is not true. In fact, the semantic reversal of the word 'gay' is only used by a small amount of young people, as we can see from the Newsbeat survey, and it is not a reflection of society's tolerance toward gay people, which has in fact become more and more relaxed over time.
So this change in word meaning is nothing to worry about. Language, just like the rest of us, undergoes evolution.
Source: BBC Newsbeat
