Muwhahahaa digging up old posts is fun. But I never responded so let me. My point was neither, my point is that usage of 'gay' in a context that is referential to a negative situation has no bearing upon its homonym definition as referring to gays. The etymological cycle of words is well noted. Let me first concede a small area of this, Gay more than likely brought this adjective homonym to the forefront when someone began using it in a pejorative manner to express dislike for a situation; this is unlike using it in a manner of name calling, but I'm betting this was its root. There is a demarcation in the game of 'name calling' in which the name no longer really relates to its original meaning and simply becomes an undefined disparage. Example, to call one a son of a ***** is literally, child of a dog, however when someone calls me this, the thought does not arise that would be lingually associated with puppies or the next lineage of dogs from a mother hound, but rather it simply clicks a, hey that wasn't nice button in the language centers in your brain. Same goes for calling people "gay" eventually it loses its homosexual connotation and thus is undefined, then it has shifted to a euphemism for something that's bad. However, the name calling form of "gay" while could be offensive to homosexuals is interim yet unrelated to the latter context. We can look at it like this, where upper case is Pejorative and lower case is Euphemistic x -> X-> Y -> y -> z , now I can simply define this definitive shift in the word. x = gay defined as homosexual (a word that has no negative connotation at its inception), X = gay as a homosexual, now it carries some offense to it, pejorative shift in etymological time line, Y = Gay used to disparage another, this carries a definition of homosexual, but is used to refer to non homosexuals disparagingly, y = Gay used as a disparaging remark, yet doesn't carry a context nor definition of homosexuality as it has lost this meaning and while its root does retain the connection, it no longer sparks the same connections in the mind as Gay reference to a homosexual, z = Gay uses in same context a y, only used as an adjective to refer to something as bad, however does not conjure the ideas of anything related to homosexuality ....
now mind you people will take offense, but that isn't the point, the point is that words follow a definitive shift that is easily observable, The context and definition of a word express how it will be decoded by our language centers in our brain. When I think of a Gay person and when I think of a Homosexual person my brain decodes this into the same exact thought. When someone says It's gay that the yankees lost to boston, I don't have anything even remotely resembling the feelings from the word Gay as a homosexual... Hope this makes sense... I know you tried to bring it down into two short lines but let me do that for you myself...
1) Gay in reference to something being bad is not associated with Gay as a homosexual thus should not conjure any offense, while the definition shift did go through some offensive reasoning, it really carries none now and its completely formed Homonym set.
2) see 1.
