Spero Consulting

Archive for February 5th, 2010

And So Is ‘Gay’

In fact, stu­dents of his­tor­i­cal lin­guis­tics could tell you that many other words are homo­graphs, too, and those stu­dents could also explain seman­tic change, includ­ing the pejo­ra­tion and recla­ma­tion of words. (Don’t be a fool, you know where this is head­ing.)

We doubt that we have much in com­mon with Pres­i­dent Obama’s Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, but we do sym­pa­thize with him for the grief he is tak­ing for using ‘retarded’ as a pejorative.

Was it poor judg­ment? Sure. Should he have known bet­ter? Of course. Are we ital­i­ciz­ing homo­graphs? You know it. (Actu­ally, because we are lazy and didn’t major in lin­guis­tics, only the homo­graphs that are easy to iden­tify and only the first time, but we’ll stop now.)

So, while polit­i­cally we tend to agree with his crit­ics like Sarah Palin, in this case we think that she and all the other cyn­i­cal or pious grievance-​mongers should grow-​up, shut-​up and go away.

If you are aggrieved by some­thing that a stranger said about some­one else in a place where you weren’t approx­i­mately six months ago, then you, dear reader, are either a cyn­i­cal, politically-​motivated d.b. or you are a humor­less scold – pos­si­bly a bit too sen­si­tive and pos­si­bly with deep emo­tional problems.

In fact, it would do every­one – indi­vid­u­ally and col­lec­tively – much good to remem­ber that on occa­sion, every­one behaves like a butthead, but there is a huge dif­fer­ence between mali­cious behav­ior and sim­ply mak­ing a mis­take in the heat of the moment.

In our mind, that dif­fer­ence is nearly anal­o­gous to Saint Fran­cis de Sales’ dis­tinc­tion between sin and imper­fec­tion; how­ever, in this case we have a dif­fer­ent ‘Fran­cis’ quote in mind. That would be one spo­ken by Sargeant Hulka in the 1981 movie, Stripes. When one of the recruits states, “… Any of you guys call me Fran­cis, and I’ll kill you,” the good sergeant replies, Lighten Up, Francis.”

So, lighten up, Sarah and posse. There are too many impor­tant issues where he is on the wrong side to worry about a silly one like this one.