(no subject)

[theweaselking]

Lesbians sue Greek homosexual rights organisations to stop them from using the term "Lesbian".

"he issue boils down to who has the right to call themselves Lesbians.

Is it gay women, or the 100,000 people living on Greece's third biggest island - plus another 250,000 expatriates who originate from Lesbos?

The man spearheading the case, publisher Dimitris Lambrou, claims that international dominance of the word in its sexual context violates the human rights of the islanders, and disgraces them around the world. "
=========================
Of course, the *correct* response here is that, while there is confusion, there is no disgrace. In order for there to be disgrace, "Lesbian" would have to be a pejorative or negative term.

Comments

[torrain.livejournal.com]

> The homosexual activists picked that name for historical reasons,
> in order to improve their image by invoking the classical era.

The word is about three hundred years old; the word with its connotations of sexual orientation appears in the almighty OED by 1870.

I would dearly love some reference here which supports your contention that the use of the word "lesbianism" to the point where it was accepted by the OED was due to a concerted effort on the part of mid-eighteen-hundreds homosexual activists trying to make "teh girl-sex" seem classier.

While you are at it, please also address why these homosexual activists seeking to evoke the classical era were not satisfied by the adjective "Sapphic", which had appeared in print in English a hundred years earlier (~1770). Was that a different group of homosexual activists? Or were there two, who were just squabbling over the best etymological basis?

I await your references.

[itlandm.livejournal.com]

I may be wrong, unlikely as this seems to me. It may be that the usage of the word has been markedly different in English, which I have only directly observed since the 1990es. In Norwegian, the word "lesbian" has definitely spread rapidly during my adult years, and the usage was spearheaded by the organization for lesbian and gay liberation, a pretty classic activist-driven organization as should be obvious merely from the name. Actually the Norwegian name is "lesbisk og homofil frigjøring", lesbian and homophile liberation. Before this, both men and women were called homophile. This was not good enough for the lesbians, so the name was changed. In my youth they were called homosexual, but this word fell into disuse because it sounded as if it were about sex rather than love. (It was not - but I don't need to explain that to linguists like you.) So we had a clear case of euphemism treadmill where in my lifetime the same people went from homosexual to homophile and now lesbian, largely at the behest of the queer community and their liberal intellectual allies.

Given that Norway has had the same development in social mores as Britain, the US and presumably also Greece, I assumed that the linguistic development was also the same. Assumptions are always a risky business but have the benefit of being much faster than research. (Besides, the voice in my head would normally warn me if I was wrong.)

If the word "lesbian" has been commonly used in English for generations, it is obviously meaningless to seek to replace it. In particular, the organizations representing lesbians would have no power to do anything about it, nor any responsibility for the usage.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

So absically we're looking at less an activist push to change and appropriate labels as we are internationalisation of language that happens anywhere.

[itlandm.livejournal.com]

Well, in this case it is a selective internationalization. We have a Norwegian word for queer, for instance. "Skeiv" (which means "slanted" or "not straight") is used in much the same was as queer. Curiously, this too is a fairly new word in this context. So we do seem to have a mild case of euphemism treadmill here. It is surprising that an officially liberal country like Norway has this, and not the supposedly more conservative USA. I shall have to accept the evidence however: It seems that English has had the same word, lesbian, for women who love women, for at least a couple centuries. This speaks rather highly of English culture, I think.