Words that have lost their meaning

[Tapewolf]

another word used to describe homosexuals i'm afraid, at least, that's it 'common' usage in the US now...

Oh, it's meant that too for the best part of 30 years, but AFAIK it's not yet reached the point where homosexuality is its default meaning.

[Sofox]

My Dad said that "stoned" used to just mean "drunk".

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

The important thing is remembering when people have the wrong end of the stick, and making sure you speak in such a fashion as to mess with their heads as much as possible.


What?

[Baal Hadad]

The filter is mostly not used, actually. We rely on people being sensible, and on the moderators coming down like a large, spiky mace on the people who aren't.

It seems to work for us. *grin*

So, there's a lot of words that will skip right past the filter. And there's a few specific words (about 5, I think - I'd look them up and list them, but... *grin*) that get caught by the filter. Generally speaking, if your sentence got caught, look at it and see if you can't rephrase it. We're mostly adult enough here that bad words aren't bad in and of themselves.

Although we do try to limit their use, since we have some young people on the forum, and we try to keep the place family-friendly. Like Eowyn.


Say "hi", Eowyn. ;-]

Well, if there are that few, then I'm surprised that was one of the ones....  It would have been difficult to rephrase it in that context because I was trying to point out that the word originally had an innocuous meaning (and was used in The Lord of the Rings, for crying out loud!), so the most I could do was replace the word with a description of it so that people will know which one I mean--rather than the other "f" word, for example, which doesn't have a monopoly on beginning with that letter despite its using that euphemism....

Queer... from what i can tell, it's original use is as a synonym for eerie, awkward, or strange...

Maybe it shows my age but I thought this was common knowledge.  "There's nowt queer as folk" is not an uncommon phrase.  Though it's probably more so in the UK than the US.

another word used to describe homosexuals i'm afraid, at least, that's it 'common' usage in the US now...

yea, i guess it could be considered common knowledge, for english majors, or people who enjoy reading, to the rest of the US at least, Queer means homosexual first and formost... which depresses me, because as you pointed out, when used properly, it's actually quite a fun word to use in everyday speech

It bothers me too because it was actually parodied on Sesame Street, of all places.  I refer specifically to the song "AB-C-DEF-GHI-JK-L-MN-OP-QR-STU-VWX-YZ"--you know, where Big Bird thought the alphabet was a word and wondered what it meant?  There's a line in there that goes "it starts out like an A word, as anyone can see/but somewhere in the middle it gets awful 'QR' to me."  I now know that's a pun on the word "queer," and it certainly didn't have any homosexual connotations back then.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

ab-ker-def-gee-jekyll-mernop-kur-stoov-wixiz.

More or less. ;-]


It's a good song. I like that song.