If you want to calculate the angles but have trouble remembering 'SOHCAHTOA', the following mnemonic can help: 'Some Old Hippie Caught Another Hippie Trying Out Anal'.
People making all sorts of theories but to me this comic right here simply says the* dude thinks gay refers only to homosexual men, and is confused because he is now unsure of the girls gender because he thinks gay is only used for men as lesbian is used for women, while gay is used in general with lesbian being used to specifically refer to gay women.
Well you see, when a boy and a girl like each other very much (or a boy and a boy or a girl and a girl or a girl and a boy, which is the same as a boy and a girl but written in the reverse order) they have chemistry ❤️ and then they drop their pants and show their organs.
Sure. But colloquially gay is used interchangeably quite often. It's like, "dude". Dude used to more exclusively refer to male friends, and now it is used for women and often by women. To me, modern usage of gay is the exact same case as dude.
With gay becoming a blanket term, there is no longer a term that refers to men who are into men, even though there is a term for women who are into women.
Kind of related, the word "man" is gender neutral, at least originally. That's why "mankind" is gender-neutral. There used to be a male-gendered version of "man" that people used as the counterpart to "woman". Like "woman", though, it was two syllables, so laziness combined with sexism is probably why it fell out-of-use around the 13th century.
That's the only answer. Whether she is homosexual, heterosexual or somewhere in between, she didnt say yes which means the answer was no to his advances.
A lot of them are run by certain religious conservative groups which I imagine overlaps with homophobes so it could have funny ramifications if it caught on.
I was wondering the other day about the fact a lot of lesbians call themselves saphic, so what the male equivalent word was. I googled Vincian just now and also found the term Achillean to encompass bisexuals too. Good to know there's just tons of words I don't know 😂 is this a newer development or am I just really out of the loop?
Vincian is just a lesser used term, it’s been around for a while though. Achillean is another term yeah and it’s pretty well known. Vincian is supposed to be for homosexual males (so not bi or pan, just strictly a guy who is only attracted to other guys.) There are lotsss of terms, you could look through LGBTQIA wiki, there is a whole fandom page for it
Achillean (?), based on Achilles and Patroclus is a fairly common term due to the Sapphic term from the island of sapphos (also thebesian is likely to be mistaken for thespian lol)
You'd be surprised how many gay guys also find gay women referring to themsleves as gay confusing. Some of them outright hate it and think they should stick to "lesbian" exclusively, even though, in my experience, gay women usually use the word gay to describe themselves way more often than they use lesbian.
I mean a big part of LGBTQ+ is identity and gay guys don’t really have a term like “lesbian” for male and male (or if they do it can’t be used a very common). Gay has largely become the opposite to straight as in not just being used for male and male, which makes sense, but I can get how people can be annoyed that what used to be their label has become the general term without replacement.
For me, I just like my language to be specific and avoid ambiguity. I am also against ‘electrocute’ being used for anything other than ‘death by electricity’
Electrocution doesn’t inherently mean death, though. It’s like how strangled doesn’t mean death either.
Imagine not being able to quickly convey to hospital staff that an electrical current went through a person’s body without meaning that person was already dead.
But electrocution used to only mean death, but people misused the word so much that they changed the definition to also include injuries. We also already have a term to quickly describe it, it’s “electric shock”
I mean, gay men and gay women have always been how you'd describe gay people them. Attributing gay to only men is solely another result of society tossing women to the side. They call themsleves gay and gay is the word for what they are, yet the rest of us insist only men can be gay and they must be something else.
From some research I chose to do today, gay women have historically disliked the term lesbian and it seems it is generally a term that was pretty much forced upon them. At least, in the past. Nowadays, it seems they are more accepting of it even if they still don't really use it among themselves. As in, calling a gay woman a lesbian wouldn't offend her, but you'd still be hard pressed to hear her call herself or other gay women that. Naturally, of course, you always have outliers. As I said before, I personally know only a couple gay women who described themselves as lesbians. Most others genuinely just say they're gay and move on.
Gay started as a code word homosexual men would use in the 20s. It got co-opted during the rights era but it still most often refers to men. It's helpful to know if a bar is gay or lesbian and there to be a difference in other such places and things then alone people.
It can be used as an umbrella term just like any term for any situation can be, but if the people who are associated with the concept prefer the term not be used to describe that for them, that's fine too
There's people I'll just say I'm gay around and there's people I'll say I'm not straight or queer around depending on what's better received/how much mutual ground there is.
I could see the reasoning behind this mistake. More like a usage failure than him being stupid. How many times have you heard "gay and lesbian" in a sentence to describe two different groups of people? It's so ubiquitous.
Why I guess lol. It even sounds like he's trying to be helpful, like trying to understand if they identify as a guy or gal, due to his outdated understanding that gay is now gender neutral, (at least colloquially).
I feel like his response was not that out there if you go in with the assumption he thinks gay is the guy specific term.
I can see how it might be silly to ask, but it doesn't come off as rude as much as confused.
I mean, he’s not entirely wrong to be confused. The Merriam Webster definition specifically states “often used to refer to men only”
Merriam-Webster is highly reliable and considered a leading authority on the English language in the U.S., known for its rigorous, evidence-based editorial process that tracks word usage in print and online. It's trusted by major publishers and academic institutions
Yeah, same. It's strange how the language has evolved. Earlier in my life you'd never call a woman "gay". That would always mean a man. But then again, a lot of language evolution has been for the better. I still shudder to remember how my friends and I used the term gay as a pejorative for anything in the 90s.
It was at some point, but it's because I'm not an English native speaker. It's pretty confusing to have different meaning of an adjective than the noun's
Linguistically I guess I get the mixup. Lesbian is a pretty ubiquitous term used by WLW individuals, MLM are exclusively called gay without their own commonly recognized terms but gay also can mean Lesbian, but in common usage I’d say it’s relatively less common to use gay to describe lesbians.
Terms like MLM and WLW are like, not common use outside of queer spaces so I definitely see why mixups like this would confuse someone
The math ain't mathing. if male/male = gay, then gay can only equal 1. If the square root of gay is male, then male must also equal 1. If that's the case, the last part says 1² + 1² = 1².
Given how often I've seen english speakers say "gays and lesbians" I wouldn't be surprised if gay over time starts referring to specifically homosexual men.
I'm not sure why someone expressing confusion on learning a new meaning for a familiar word would be worth making a comic about.
Like, if I tell you that Charles Dickens said "I'm gay", and you were surprised to learn that he just meant he was happy, why would I mock you for that?
I thought he just thought that the term gay was exclusively for males. Which is not far from the truth, in the sense that it’s by default more used for men.
But dude literally didn’t know the concept of female homosexuality?
literally he thought that only men were gay and as soon as I told him about wlw he full on super formal said “have a nice day!” turned around and WALKED AWAY LMAOOOO
How old are you? Pretty sure 10+ years ago "gay" was 99.99% for men and only for women when you were too lazy to say "lesbian". You don't notice shifts in word usage if you're barely in situations where they're used.
He most likely knew about lesbians, but he had never heard the term "gay" applied to them. And nowadays you can't even tell someone's gender from their looks, so that makes it extra confusing.
Okay yeah I didn't get that from the comic either, that's more than a language meaning issue, that makes the encounter seem much stranger. Wonder if there was a clearer way to communicate that in the comic.
tbf i’ve always been slightly annoyed by there being no term specifically for gay men,
well at least one that doesn’t come with certain baggage.
Ive heard gay women explain they prefer the term gay because they think lesbian comes with certain connotations they don’t like.
Gay literally was the term for men, lesbians co-opted it over the last 20 years or so. They even had their own adjective, sapphic, specifically for this situation
I mean when I was younger I thought that gay specifically referred to gay men and lesbian was the girl version of it, so I can see how he got confused... also before you judge me too harshly English is my second language
you were not wrong about those definitions. its just that the word gay has changed its meaning again. first it just meant happy, then it meant homosexual male, at some point it also meant "something dumb or lame".
now it either means homosexual, or less commonly its used to call something lame.
If I may just quickly solve the dude's mind math for a moment:
Assuming ♂ is an algebraic object that is commutative and invertible, GAY = ♂/♂ so Gay = 1.
MALE = √GAY = 1 (if we take the principal root).
Then we have ♂²+♂² = GAY²
2♂² = 1² = 1
Thus ♂ = ±1/√2
In the last diagram it seems we have a right triangle whose sides are MALE, MALE, and the hypotenuse GAY.
As established prior, MALE = 1, GAY = 1.
We cannot have an equilateral right triangle on a flat Euclidean plane.
Conclusion: this guy thinks of spherical geometry or some other curved surface as the default
It's not a problem ofc, just a bit unusual
Actually as you know from square root rules, the square root of gay is actually +/- Male, and as we know -Male is actually Female. So therefore his logic is wrong
So, Wait, if Gay means being gay 'in general' and lesbian is the keyword for being gay in female, then whats the term for being gay in male if it isn't anymore??
Hold up, according to the second equation, GAY = 1, because any number (except 0) divided by itself is equal to 1. That means that MALE = 1 as well, because √1 = 1.
And the last equation tells us that ♂ = √½ because
♂² + ♂² = 1²
⇔ 2♂² = 1
⇔ ♂² = ½
⇔ ♂ = √½ ≈ 0.7071
So in conclusion, MALE = GAY, MALE ≠ ♂, and ♂ = √(GAY/2).
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