Another word for homophobia
From Cole Paulson (in my Innovations seminar winter quarter):
gaycism used as a parallel to
racism and a competitor to
homophobia (a word that some object
to as suggesting, via its
-phobia
portion, too narrow a meaning). It's two syllables shorter than
homophobia and fits well with some
of the other
-ism words (
sexism and
antisemitism, in particular), and
of course there's that rhyme with
racism,
which can be exploited to emphasize parallels between the two types of
prejudice, as in this
report on the
Queerty blog about a recent interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu:
He went on to use the lessons of
apartheid to make the controversial correlation between racism and
gaycism
I get a modest number of Google webhits, most of them clearly treating
the word as novel, some taking credit for coining it.
If
gaycism catches on,
-cism might become available as a
new suffix. Re-cutting, anyone?
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 20, 2007 11:42 AM