I grew up with an older brother who would call things gay in a derogatory way back when we were teenagers and i also picked up the habit even though I had never met a gay person and have never had (and still dont have) any hate for them or anyone regardless of sexual preference or gender identity
I still call things gay tho to this day, usually when something kinda annoying happens (e.g. that was kinda gay when the teacher made us do extra homework)
I’m sure there are people who might feel hurt about that so i filter myself when meeting new people and i generally use it less these days but it happens sometimes
Anyone else relate to this?
You’re talking about using the term as a pejorative. I graduated HS in 2001, and it was pretty common to hear “gay” used as a pejorative back then. If I were to take a guess, I imagine you might live in a rather rural area.
It’s probably best to just retrain your brain about using the term as a pejorative… unless something is just gay… like shirts with rainbows that say “Pride”… those are gay.
Do you still call things retarded too? Best to retrain that one out of your vocabulary too, unless you want to be an edge-lord when you talk about music that has slowed down.
Off topic but the video of Linus Tech Tips casually mentioning how he used to “drop hard Rs when he was younger” was hilarious to me. For context, he was confused and thought the term hard R referred to that instead of to the N word.
It’s one of those dangerously funny jokes. I’ll see things starting with R and want to make a callback to that moment by jokingly incorrectly calling it a hard R. But also, it is a pretty niche joke that few people are aware of, so for about a week after it I had to stop myself from doing stupid jokes like calling rye bread “hard R” in public and getting myself cancelled lol. Because what the hell would you do!? Someone just stops in the bread aisle and stares at you then you say “oh, sorry, there was a video recently where someone got hard R mixed up with the R word instead of the N word and I thought that was funny so I was jokingly calling anything starting with the letter R as a hard R to get a chuckle and remind people of that humourous moment of confusion but you didn’t see that so you thought I was just referring to it as a synonym of the N word.” Yeah, that would go over great!