You mentioned a tranny in my circle of young motorheads and you meant a car’s transmission.
These days we’d need a new slang term for the gearbox.
Along that line, a headline writer on Friday risked adverse reaction noting that “trannies” were taking a beating. It referred to publicly traded stock shares of transportation companies, which were down in price on the day.
Wonder if the author is being sought out for punishment due to the insensitive choice of words?
A meaning change similar to tranny was underway even as tranny still meant transmission. I recall a high school English teacher reading a passage with the word gay in it, denoting happy and light-spirited. We kids snickered and the teacher relayed to us how she just hated that one of her favorite words had been appropriated for a totally different meaning.
Perhaps you have seen or heard that certain European precincts these days are in a war against the letter Z because it supposedly connotes support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Can’t display a Z publicly in two German states without facing prosecution which could lead to a fine or up to three years in jail.
Welcome to 1984, 2022 variation. There isn’t even a letter Z in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, but Russians were said to be marking their military equipment with painted Zs to differentiate them from Ukraine weaponry.
This had to mean that a Z portrayed anywhere was a public declaration of support for the Russians and a variation of hate speech, the ridiculous concept that invalidates the basic reality lesson preached by parents to kids once upon a time: Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me.
We’ve devolved into a society so intent on policing any verbal slights, real or imagined, that we’ve created a whole class of opportunists eager to claim they’ve been offended and thus caused to assume the fetal position and suck their thumbs all due to a spoken or written word.
And you wonder what these people would do if confronted with an actual problem like a gun being pointed in their face, or a family member dying, or their hyper-sensitive selves losing their job.
This sort of navel gazing came to mind while watching an episode of The Rockford Files the other night, in which lead character Jim Rockford mentioned to a mafia type that the man’s son might be a homosexual, a condition the father found scandalous.
Note that Rockford didn’t say fag or queer, derogatory slang at the time (mid-1970s) for gay folk. He used a perfectly acceptable, if clinical sounding word. At least it was acceptable then for a prime-time TV series.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t heard the word homosexual used in awhile, so I did some research to be sure, unlike our “Dilbert Street” news anchor on the local NBC affiliate.
Yep, homosexual now is offensive. It’s an interesting transition because one New York Times story explaining the offensiveness was illustrated by a picture of a man holding a protest sign reading “Homosexual Love Is Beautiful.”
That shot had been snapped in 1971, showing a stereotypical image of a guy with peace sign ear ring and matching pendant, wearing dress pants and shirt while those around him were wearing shorts and casual summer clothing.
The story, written in 2014, noted the man who obviously was protesting for the cause, might want to word his sign differently today.
But why?
Because taking offense now is the national pastime and when you run short on actual crimes such as assault, you come up with something else to claim victimhood. Think Jussie Smollett.
If you can claim offense over both race and sexual orientation, that is the daily double.
Spoiler alert: When the mafia son would not agree to go “straight” – sexually, not in terms of criminal behavior — the father gave the word to an associate to take care of the problem and the son was shot dead.
Acceptable slang at the time for that outcome could have been that he had him rubbed out, blown away, whacked, popped, snuffed or smoked.
These days those slang terms likely also would be deemed offensive, not because they describe humans killing other humans, but because they might hurt someone’s feelings with perceived gay innuendo
And that clearly is the much greater offense.
Sam Ross Jr's site 