#Define lame as a noun free

An example is a letter read to a London court in 1885 during the prosecution of brothel madam and procuress Mary Jeffries that had been written by a girl while enslaved inside of a French brothel: A gay woman was a prostitute, a gay man a womanizer, and a gay house a brothel. By the late 17th century, it had acquired the specific meaning of 'addicted to pleasures and dissipations', an extension of its primary meaning of 'carefree' implying 'uninhibited by moral constraints'. The word may have started to acquire associations of immorality as early as the 14th century, but had certainly acquired them by the 17th. Usage statistics from English books, according to Google Ngram Viewer.

#Define lame as a noun free

The derived abstract noun gaiety remains largely free of sexual connotations and has, in the past, been used in the names of places of entertainment, such as the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin. It was apparently not until the 20th century that the word began to be used to mean specifically 'homosexual', although it had earlier acquired sexual connotations. The title of the 1938 French ballet Gaîté Parisienne ('Parisian Gaiety'), which became the 1941 Warner Brothers movie, The Gay Parisian, also illustrates this connotation. For example, the optimistic 1890s are still often referred to as the Gay Nineties. In English, the word's primary meaning was 'joyful', 'carefree', 'bright and showy', and the word was very commonly used with this meaning in speech and literature. The word gay arrived in English during the 12th century from Old French gai, most likely deriving ultimately from a Germanic source. One woman says to the other (who looks glum), 'How long have you been gay?' The poster on the wall is for La Traviata, an opera about a courtesan. History OverviewĬartoon from Punch magazine in 1857 illustrating the use of 'gay' as a colloquial euphemism for being a prostitute. The extent to which these usages still retain connotations of homosexuality has been debated and harshly criticized. Among younger speakers, the word has a meaning ranging from derision (e.g., equivalent to 'rubbish' or 'stupid') to a light-hearted mockery or ridicule (e.g., equivalent to 'weak', 'unmanly', or ' lame'). Īt about the same time, a new, pejorative use became prevalent in some parts of the world. By the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century, the word gay was recommended by major LGBT groups and style guides to describe people attracted to members of the same sex, although it is more commonly used to refer specifically to men. In the 1960s, gay became the word favored by homosexual men to describe their sexual orientation.

In modern English, gay has come to be used as an adjective, and as a noun, referring to the community, practices and cultures associated with homosexuality. While scant usage referring to male homosexuality dates to the late 19th century, that meaning became increasingly common by the mid-20th century. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'. Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual.