So I put my foot in it with this expression, sorry. I deeply respect any orientation.
I agree and also decry the hijacking of words or phrases by special interest groups. However, the fact remains that these words have different meanings than they used to and those who unwittingly use them are letting themselves in for a world of pain, regardless of the innocence of their intentions."Queer" used to mean odd or unusual. The word was used quite frequently in those instances. But our new yuppie mentality decided that since it was occasionally used to describe someone who was homosexual, it's been deemed derogatory, and we should no longer use it. "Gay", which used to mean happy or joyous, fell to the same demise.
Totally unnecessary to apologize. Your grasp of the English language is excellent.
"Queer" used to mean odd or unusual. The word was used quite frequently in those instances. But our new yuppie mentality decided that since it was occasionally used to describe someone who was homosexual, it's been deemed derogatory, and we should no longer use it. "Gay", which used to mean happy or joyous, fell to the same demise.
I was raised amid a fairly large group of people from Mexico, who were quite comfortable with being called Mexican (just as you could be called a German). But for some reason the younger generation has taken it upon themselves to make "Mexican" a derogatory word, and is rarely used any more.
Sad, but that's the way our language is now.
This could be fun to discuss, as I suspect it involves some playful 1940s era slang, so give us some examples.I love these recordings, but it is so difficult to understand Bing's comments. Why is this so? Does he speak a special slang or dialect? It is a bit frustrating, it is as if the English language was almost entirely new to me...
(I'm listening to it in this very moment, it is so beautiful!)
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"Gay", which used to mean happy or joyous, fell to the same demise.
This could be fun to discuss, as I suspect it involves some playful 1940s era slang, so give us some examples.
Yeah, as something of an old movie aficionado, I can tell you this: they talked weird in the 1940s.Bing introduces every song on this album with a memory, or a little anecdote or something like that, very nice. But he is speaking very fast and his pronunciation sounds unusual to me. And he uses expressions and words which are unknown to me.
Chris, did you mean "unambiguous" or "ambiguous"?I wish that the English language (in general) was not so unambiguous.
I wouldn't worry about it. A little while ago, I edited a post of mine in a different thread that read something like this: "I sometimes think that (... such-and-such a thing is the case ...) sometimes."Ambiguous. Holy crap. How embarrassing.
Mehrdeutig auf Deutsch.I don´t even know what ambiguous means