Gay word-play
Sir: Paul Johnson's case (Another thing, 1
April) for reclaiming the 'purloined' word gay is specious: for while the term for gays remains in flux, his real target, the minority group itself, is clearly here to stay.
There is a great tradition of adjectives released from some banal anchorage to lodge more usefully elsewhere, or even to be tossed about from meaning to meaning and from age to age.
In Elizabethan English you could happy your friend, and you could foot your enemy; you could also, perhaps, be tongued by your mistress. Not one of those verbs has retained its earlier meaning. The word gay, as both adjective and noun, has filled a vac- uum in the language, a fact which Mr John- son has apparently not grasped. The term molly-house and molly of the 17th century would perhaps have served had they not been thrown out with the frigid Victorian bathwater — indeed they carry none of the clinical or presumptuous overtones of the concocted word homosexual. One can't get away with the word sodomist, however, as favoured by your ill-intentioned writer. It will not serve because it includes dabblers in incest, bestialism, rape and whoredom, as well as buggery. The 10 per cent of het- erosexuals who report their own sodomiti- cal practices outnumber all the other bug- gers.
Malcolm Ronan 11 Munro Street,
Kew East, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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