“It's a great day i’m feeling gay!” “I don’t want to do that, it’s gay.” The word gay has evolved throughout the 1800s to now. In the 1800s the word gay was used in a different context than today. The denotative meaning of the word gay in present day is to be sexually attracted to people of the same sex and not to people of the opposite sex. In the book Language In Thought and Action by S. I. Hayakawa in chapter 5 Hayakawa talked about how some words simultaneously arouse both informative and affective connotations making it hard to discuss religious, racial, national, and political groups. Example in the United States they are strong prejudice against Mexicans the press use the term Hispanic instead to avoid any negative connotation. In present day the word gay is a term with a build in judgement because in our society many people believe that loving someone of the same sex is wrong but people still use it over other words …show more content…
Ever since then the word slowly evolved to be used to describe someone that is sexually attracted to the same sex and as an insult but many people did not understand the new meaning of gay but figured it out. In the book Hayakawa had a section in chapter 4 titled “Verbal and Physical Contexts” talking about this and how if a word is unfamiliar, its meaning becomes clear to us as we listen. The example he used was “oboe”. “He used to be the best oboe player in town... Whenever they came to that oboe part in the third movement, he used to get very excited.... I saw him one day at the music shop, buy a new reed for his oboe.... He never liked to play the clarinet after he started playing the oboe. He said it wasn't as much fun, because it was to easy.” We know that an oboe is played so it must be a game or a musical instrument. Same thing for the word gay as it changed it’s meaning people listen to the contexts to know what it