once-common words people don’t use anymore

In my world 'gay' was a term that was born in the 70s and flourished in the 80s, but I don't remember 'queer' coming into prominence until a couple of decades later

In my admittedly 'outsider' understanding, both "gay" and "queer" have evolved from a more general denotation of homosexuality during the 70's and 80's into the more specialized terms now in modern use. But when I grew up they had zero connection to homosexuality among the general population. They meant "happy and carefree" and "strange or odd", respectively.

I don't remember when I first heard the word 'gay', but I'm sure it was in the 70s and I remember even as a kid realizing that it applied to me.

I and pretty much every other gay person I knew in the 80s hated the word 'queer', it was derogatory. I know that it's been reclaimed and is not viewed that way today, but I still can't use that word

it still feels hurtful to me

I remember walking down Market Street in the 90s with a straight friend and having some yahoo screaming "queers!" at us out of their car window. I took it in stride but he was shocked and insulted

felt in the moment that he got a sense of another world he wasn't anticipating

I have never, ever heard the adjective 'ducky'.

I read loads of Enid Blyton as a kid, so gay meant happy, and queer meant slightly odd, usually with a magical connotation. I actually really love the word 'queer' in its original meaning - obviously I don't use it in conversation but it has a sort of folky otherworldly glimmering sense, to me.

(xp) It's American.

Is it? I seem to recall seeing Marlene Dietrich say it as a Cockney in Witness for the Prosecution, but maybe she was more from the Dick Van Dyke part of London.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NF_X20zoNJ0
Oh, but then it is not an adjective.

Yes, that's the difference.

"Don we now our gay apparel" was barely snicker-worthy in 1975 but definitely got a juvenile laugh in the 80s.

Circa 1986, at my high school, theater kids were called "drama queers" and chose to reappropriate it. We used "DQs" as a general term for ourselves and one another, regardless of identity or presentation.

(Treading carefully here) "Band fags" were a separate but adjacent group. They also chose to apply it to themselves, with varying levels of irony. A friend of mine who was president of the Sexual Minority Student Alliance referred to himself as "the head fag."

Now have a trans child in high school and the layers are... more complex and nuanced than I could possibly have imagined circa 1982.

One notable thing is that the f-word above has become utterly unspeakable. It's as unusable as the n-word. I don't miss it. No loss, as far as I am concerned, but it's an interesting development.

"Queer" as an LGBTQIA+ catchall appears to still be viable and useful, at least as far as I can tell.

“on the war path”

My third grade teacher said this all the time

I was in third grade last year

Does anybody talk about evacuating their bowels any more?

not since Mario Puzo in The Godfather novel

now everyone calls their shit BM to sound smart

Sucker strikes me as one of those words from early-80s hip hop that doesn't get used a lot nowadays. Perhaps because it sounds rude. Like the f-word (the bad f-word). Was it ever a thing?

Perhaps because my mum was born in Liverpool I remember the phrase "mad pash" when I was young, but it only has about a thousand Google hits. Which is a shame because it's very evocative.

I have a half-formed thesis about bad language in films. It goes that (a) bad language was verboten in the past, so film characters said gosh and heck and baloney and darn (b) then bad language became not just permissible but fashionable, at a time when 18-certificate / R-rated films were common and very popular, thus e.g. Goodfellas and "suck my lozenge" and "you fun my wife?" (c) but over the last thirty years or so the trend has been for 15-cert / PG-13 films, so bad language has faded away, beyond even the one-f-word-per-film rule (d) but because swearing still exists and is common in e.g. hip-hop, the likes of crap and heck etc haven't come back into fashion because they just seem absurd (e) with the result that modern PG-13 films not only don't have the bad f-word etc, they don't even have "penis breath" or "it's true that this man has no dick", they just have flat, functional dialogue with no bad language at all (f) perhaps because there's more incentive to tailor films to international audiences, where (fa) standards are tighter (fb) insults are culturally different.

For example, for all I know "penis breath" might be a term of endearment in Australia. How can I be sure? Everybody lies. So if I was writing a film for the Australian market I would leave that out. Imagine how difficult it must be writing a film that will be subtitled, where you have to be conscious of the sound of the words as well, not just their meaning.

I usually don't make it to point (f) and I've never before had to break point (f) into sub-points. You're witnessing a world first here.

is casual homophobia still prevalent in high schools these days? when I went to school everything was "gay". your teachers were gay. homework was gay. thunderstorms ruining your camping trip were gay. I even remember a webcomic that tried to coin the term "ghey" as a non-offensive pejorative (?). do teenagers still talk like that?

everything is sus now

Kenneth Williams uses "gay" in his diaries in the 1940s

"Turkey" in the sense of something that is a dud or a loser.

i say that one, but only because I'm a theatre person ,and that godawful Annie Get Your Gun was one of the first musicals I did, which features the lyric "even with a turkey that you know will fold", and that stuck with me as a 16 year old.

I'm probably the only person who still says it though.

more recently I've stopped calling plays "turkeys" and when I'm in a bad one, will just turn to the person next to me and say "are we gonna play Stonehenge tomorrow?"

Jazz Odyssey

You couldn't move for 'poseurs' in the 90s, not seen that for a while.

also Male Chauvinist Pigs

poseurs/posers is a great word

BTW, "gay" is 19th century. It was originally a general word for the sexual underground that had narrowed into a term for just the same-sex portion by 1905.

I call people posers all the time, someone has to uphold the ideals that Manowar laid out for us

Frogbs, I know a fair number of teenagers; i don't think they use it that way anymore.

But I hasten to note that all the teenagers I know are gay

I await the return of "boss" to describe something superlative, fantastic, amazing, splendid.

No, it will be “worker” instead

The children's mystery book "Something Queer Is Going On" (1973) is the only non-queer association I have ever had with the word in my life, I think. Like I really don't remember ever hearing it out loud, although that's the kind of thing where memory could be very unreliable.

― Doctor Casino

and even that book series is only _arguably_ non-queer, depending on one's opinion on whether or not children's books can be "queer-coded"

one of my favorite things is watching outtake reels from the 1930s and 1940s. most of the expletives are still in common use as expletives today, but one very much is not: "Ah, nuts!", which was clearly formerly spoken in the same context and with the same intonation as "Son of a bitch!"

there's another epithet i'd totally forgotten until i started reading the 1992 archives of the usenet group alt.transgendered. posters there complain often about being called "pantywaists". i mean, i was alive for this, i remember this, people actually called effeminate AMABs "pantywaists" in fucking _1992_. how bizarre is that?

The Hays Code literally forbade "nuts" as an interjection in Hollywood films from 1939 into the 1960s. (The word made it into some pre-1939 films).

I just watched Auntie Mame (1958) recently and in it iirc there's a gag about Mame (Rosalind Russell) almost saying it. She's characterized as having a tart tongue.

a quick search on twitter shows that "pantywaist" is still in vogue on the right

I await the return of "boss" to describe something superlative, fantastic, amazing, splendid.

Still very popular around Liverpool.

my 5 year old has been hanging out with his grandfather and now says "rats" when something doesn't go his way

my dad would say "Rats! R.. A.. T.. Z... RATZ!"

Does anything get called "crud" these days?

literally every one of my co-workers says "crud" as an substitute for an expletive and I have one friend who calls her allergies the "creeping crud" which is almost enough for me to write her out of my will if I a) had a will and b) if she had been in it to begin with

a quick search on twitter shows that "pantywaist" is still in vogue on the right

― rare lipstick or mohawks that somehow make them more valuable (President Keyes)

maybe it's taken seriously regionally, or something. or maybe it's just another "the right being completely out of touch with reality" thing, idk.

creeping crud is a contagious disease, c'mon coworker

so let it be written
so let it be done
i've got a case of creeping crud

Frogbs, I know a fair number of teenagers; i don't think they use it that way anymore.

But I hasten to note that all the teenagers I know are gay

― Nutellanor Roosevelt (Ye Mad Puffin), Wednesday, June 22, 2022 8:18 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

hah

just speaking from personal experience but I'm amazed how many teens I meet now who are openly queer in some direction, I mean good for them obviously but this also means a lot of the people I went to high school with were also that way but couldn't express it or be open about it. I have a couple friends/acquaintances who are struggling with their identity right now which strikes me as not what you wanna be doing in your 30s

friends with benefits should be replaced by friends without obligations to mean the opposite, a far more privileged status

"i say that one, but only because I'm a theatre person ,and that godawful Annie Get Your Gun was one of the first musicals I did, which features the lyric "even with a turkey that you know will fold", and that stuck with me as a 16 year old.

I'm probably the only person who still says it though.

― Doop Snogg (Neanderthal)"

with god as my witness, i thought turkeys could fly

now _that_ one, nobody fucking remembers that anymore

"Frogbs, I know a fair number of teenagers; i don't think they use it that way anymore.

But I hasten to note that all the teenagers I know are gay

― Nutellanor Roosevelt (Ye Mad Puffin)"

oh god not _quite_ on topic for thread but i love so much the way kids these days use the term "gay panic". when they use it it's like "i'm a disaster lesbian and this girl is super fucking hot and i'm mentally keysmashing trying to figure out how to tell her how hot she is". god, i know the us is a dystopia and the world is a pile of shit and things have literally never been as brutal for trans people as they are now but i'm still so fucking _happy_, one might say _gay_ even, over stuff like that.

Apparently my use of the word “necking” (to mean extended, passionate kissing) marks me firmly as a Gen-X-er, as firmly as the use of “groovy” might mark a certain kind of boomer. I had no idea it wasn’t in circulation anymore.