Reader Ray Eckhart sends along this Alison Bechdel comic strip that speaks provocatively to many of the issues of word ownership and signification raised in the comments section of this post (ignore the few trolls, please; they’ve already been fed). Writes Ray:

One way to combat the feeling of being offended, is to develop a sense of humor. Some folks in my world are kinda miffed about the pejorative use of the word *gay* used by today’s youth:

‘That’s so gay’ meaning ‘That’s so lame’.

Given [Jeff G’s] fondness for words, labels, and the meanings attached to them in and out of context, coupled with his exposure of and to the scholarship in the area, I thought you guys might get a kick outta this [comic].

Explaining gay subculture within the greater context of American culture ain’t always easy, but it can be done, and sometimes it’s funny.

Question: how does “gay” (in the sense of “lame”) come to count as perjorative toward homosexuals in the first place? Why isn’t such usage offensive to, say, happy people?

That is, how does the signifier “gay” come to be offensive at all? Can a particular group really make the case for owning a specific combination of sounds, or a specific grapheme? And if so, how?*

Because like or not, these questions are beginning to make their way through the legal system, and how we answer them now might very well affect the laws we make later.

*Here is the PDF doc of some notes and commentary I’ve put together on interpretation theory and word usage. These notes are geared toward a specific sequence of undergraduate honors seminars I taught a few years back, but they may nevertheless prove useful to those of you wishing to extrapolate out from them my particular take on interpretation.

The document is fairly lengthy and covers a wide-range of topics relevant to this post and the above linked thread, including a discussion on “race” and racial aesthetics, deconstruction, hermeneutics, semiotics, and intentionalism.

Don’t feel compelled to read it, especially if such things bore you. But don’t say I haven’t provided you with anything specific (you know who you are) on how I believe language to work.