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i'm wondering why it's so widely accepted as an insult- it's the new "retard."
"retard" is good evidence that a term can be somewhat neutralized by repeated use. the simpson's mocked "gay" one time i think in 1997, when a bully said, "that dude kissed a girl- that's SOOO GAY!" ha.
perhaps my interest in "gay" is that the retarded population is far less likely to take personal offense or feel out of place while surfing the net. so i think that "gay" may be a rather unique singling out.
i've done some searching on usenet, and there i can't find any other class-descriptive terms commonly used as a generic insult. though "nigger" may be gaining momentum.
my point is that this word use is not so mundane. gay-bashing terms are perhaps the longest-running class descriptive general insults used on the web (that have any chance of offending the term's origin class). if people really ran around calling eachother "chink" or "buddhist" as a general insult without knowledge of the target, i would not be interested in "gay."
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