Defiant Desire: Gay and Lesbian Lives in South Africa. Gay - Ngram Viewer. Urban Dictionary. British Library - Gay. 'If you are gay you are just bad' - Features. Comment:5 average rating | Comments (17)Last Updated:20 February, 2011Section:Features While British society as a whole may have become less prejudiced in its attitude to gay people, schools remain a stronghold of homophobia. Pupils are the perpetrators, but are teachers to blame for turning a blind eye? The closest Stacie has come to a gay man is seeing Syed and Christian, the gay characters in EastEnders, on TV. “In our terms we’d call them a batty man” she says. The Jamaican slang word literally means “bum man”. “My dad’s full Jamaican. He was born over there and he doesn’t believe in gays.” If someone Stacie knew came out as gay, “I wouldn’t talk to her. Her classmate Jonathan agrees: “If you’re gay, you’re just different,” he says.
For these 15-year-olds from east London and their friends, insulting gay people is perfectly acceptable. Jonathan and Stacie’s views seem so dated, it is difficult to believe they were speaking to The TES only last term. . * Name has been changed. Examining the OED - Case study: terms for lesbian(ism) Terms for lesbian: how different stages of editing OED are reflected in links to HTOED Words for female homosexual were under-recorded in the original OED. The sexual sense of lesbian (both adjective and noun) was left out of OED1, and - most unusually - we have clear evidence of the deliberate decision to continue to exclude it from the Dictionary during the editing of the first Supplement in 1933 (see Brewer 2007b: 49-50). This is striking, given that the 1933 Supplement did include, for the first time, the term homosexual (adj.), defined as 'Pertaining to or characterized by sexual propensity for one's own sex'.
Along with lesbianism, lesbian (noun and adjective) was finally added to OED in R. W. Burchfield's second Supplement in 1976 (vol 2), with quotations dating from 1890 (1870 for lesbianism); in fact it was used in print as early as 1732. 1. flatsNot in OED. The OED1 quotations are as follows: 1607 B. 4. tommyNot in OED. (Anon, The Adulteress, S. Further reading Andreadis, A. Lesbian - Ngram Viewer. How lesbians penetrated the Oxford English Dictionary.