In this world there are words that are considered “good” or “bad”. Do you consider the word gay as either of those? I was told I had a to write an essay on a word. My first thought was ‘how is this possible?’. So, I took a few days to think about what word to use to write a whole paper on and bingo I found it. The word I chose is gay. Why you may ask because gay is used more in more every day and has become socially acceptable. Another reason was because words like family, love, hell and dog are words everyone uses and most of the time don’t think twice of them. So, I thought about it and decided it would be a good word since people react differently to it almost every time they hear it. When someone looks up a word typically it is because …show more content…
The word gay like many words go back s few hundreds of years in writing. Gay is said to have entered the English language in 1310 ( “Gay" The Oxford English Dictionary, corrected re-issue, vol VI, second).In years to follow he word gay was used to describe something for example ‘That dress of your is rather gay’ meaning the dress looks nice. In this example the word gay is used as an adjective to describe something. Although gay hasn’t always been acceptable in life it ‘first appeared around the 1340s in English writing (“Gay" The Oxford English Dictionary, corrected re-issue, vol VI, second edition, 1989, p. 409-410). The word may have many suffixes, but the root word is gay itself. Over the long period of time spelling has not changed much unless a suffix was added to the word for example: gaydar or gayness. Gay has been used as a noun and as an adjective. It was first used as an adjective meant to describe something(Harper, Douglas. gay. www.etymonline.com/search?q=gay). In society today, the word is used more as an adjective. Many people use this word to describe someone’s life style or if something doesn’t go the way the person wants it to. The word used to describe someone’s lifestyle has lead to many historical events which has helped defined the word as it is used