chillichocaholic said:

spouse, significant other, partner all were gay exclusive terms at one time.

Where does "pardner" fit in to all of this?

NDRU said:

howdy!

NDRU said:

brokeback mountain?

Anxiety said:

have you seen the cast for Big Brother?

ehuffnsd said:

except for very rare hungover weekend marathon viewings, i'm allergic to reality television

i just say, 'this is my big love muffin.'

Gay or straight, I don't really care for any of the BedBuddy terms.

-Husband/Wife sounds like some dull yuppie suburban fucks. Ew, pass.
-Spouse sounds like a tax form option
-Same goes for Domestic Partner
-Boyfriend/Girlfriend sounds like you're sitting in 8th grade math class
-Partner by itself sounds like you work together at a law firm
-Friend is too generic. You're not screwing ALL your friends, are you?
-Lover makes me think of those shitty Harlequin romance novels


I'm actually kind of partial to Old Man/Old Lady. Sadly, these are not terms that made it to RetroCool status and therefore never struck big with my generation. Bummer.

meow85 said:

Oh geez where I live Old Man/Old Lady are siad by people who us "me" instad of my....
"Yeah mate..this is ME old Lady" Followed by a beer being gulped down by a guy sporting a mullet with a cigarette tucked behind his ear

meow85 said:

[Edited 7/11/08 9:20am]

Most LGBTs I know use "boyfriend," "girlfriend," "husband," or "wife" among people with whom they feel comfy. It's only in mixed company that they feel the need for more "strategic" or PC words.

HamsterHuey said:

Is this your new universal response?

NDRU said:

thats exactly how I use it. its non-specific to sexual orientation or gender.
i often hear 'partner' used in referring to straight couples on main stream talk radio all the time.
I also feel its progressive. And nods to political awareness of true equality and dismisses any old superstitious religious definitions of what human relationships are.
[Edited 7/11/08 11:37am]

NDRU said:

Sometimes, when you encounter beauty, it's one's job to spread joy.

I just still had it underneath my copy/paste button.

HamsterHuey said:

it's just funny because I came here directly from your mixtape thread where you'd posted it

horatio said:

horatio said:

and since we're not married, we run into the same issues. We've been together for 10 years, but she's not my wife exactly. "Partner" used to sound weird, it made me think "sex partner," but I've gotten used to it and it describes us well.
[Edited 7/11/08 11:41am]

chillichocaholic said:

Australia though, eh?

Around here the only folks that ever use the term are aging hippies who never left the 60's. I like it though. It's affectionate, sweet without being cloying, kinda humorous.

HamsterHuey said:

Lammastide said:

Um, but wouldn't just referring to your partner as you see fit be more PC than tailoring your language to fit uptight conservatives? The "too PC" criticism is generalyy reserved for tailoring language to be more inclusive for liberals, not vague for repressed conservatives.

FYI.

meow85 said:

I understand where you get that, but I take issue with that line. I observe that the burdensome need to tweak, truncate or equivocate common language happens to appease tightwads as well as hippies.

Lammastide said:

Can you give some examples? I can't recall any instances where language tweaking was done to satisfy conservatives.

Anxiety said:

I find myself saying "significant other" in regards to gay and straight relationships. I even say it regarding myself and sometimes I wonder if people think I'm gay when I say that. Oh well, it's fun keeping 'em guessing.

meow85 said:

It’s tough to state this briefly. Forgive me. (And because I bring up several groups, I want to say off the bat I mean zero offense to anyone. This is merely my about conservative sway over language [which I'm not saying is always negative, BTW])...

For starters, when’s the last time you heard a liberal politician publicly call him/herself a “liberal?” It’s been made such a dirty word by a succession of conservative leadership that it is far less risky for even the most left-leaning official these days to call him/herself something like “progressive.”

At the same time, when’s the last time you heard a conservative politician not break his/her neck to publicly cast him/herself as a “conservative” – and specifically a conservative in the ilk of Reagan? This, despite the fact Reagan is remembered as effecting policies that probably would get him stamped as soft as McCain nowadays: amnesty to 6.5 million undocumented aliens; a $165 billion bailout of Social Security; the creation of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs and the addition of 65,000 employees on the federal payroll; a softening on arms controls positions with the Soviets; multiple tax hikes; yada yada yada. Yet the sleight of hand being done 1) around the legacy of Reagan; and 2) with certain folk now convincingly invoking the term “conservative” as something that ties them ideologically both to Reagan and to the very different Whig Party, for example, suggests folk are accepting their reappropriation of history and language hook, line and sinker.

Some other examples:

• On July 10, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a declaration that Protestant places of worship are not, in fact, “churches,” but mere “ecclesial communities.” This was done in the wake of conservative Catholics, who, since Vatican II, have expressed angst that the Church had taken on an uncomfortably (and some believe heretically) collegial ecumenical position. This hasn’t yet penetrated rank-and-file Catholics it seems, but in my vocational circles (where future Catholic leadership is groomed) I hear the revised language used – and parried… and defended – with growing regularity.

• “Friendly fire” or (in the UK) ‘blue-on-blue” loss: Nice military terms to keep the taste of death out of the mouths of civilians and thus keep war nicely packaged. But is there anything qualitatively different -- much less “friendlier” -- about getting your head blown off by an enemy vs. by an incompetent pal on the frontline? Why not let’s just call it all what it is – useless killing?

• “Hispanic” as a discrete ethnic subset. Since when does one’s linguistic heritage warrant their separation from others of equally varied ethnic makeup? We don’t employ special boxes for “White, non-Francophone” or “Black, non-Yoruba” in the U.S., yet it has become imperative that we separate out and keep a tally on ancestral Spanish speakers. To be sure, the categorization came by way of an ostensible “liberal” senator in the ‘70s, who was trying to secure federal social aid for Spanish speakers, a discriminated-against group. But it’s safe to suggest the perpetual head count (not to mention the discrimination itself) was thought necessary only as the growing number of ancestral Spanish speakers in the U.S. posed a real projected challenge to Anglophile cultural superiority. This idea that a richly diverse population of people are somehow so internally the same, yet so markedly different than “the rest of us” based solely on ancestral language -- and that their numbers need to be monitored -- smacks of efforts to sustain the status quo, the defining objective of conservatism.

• In an example somewhat closer to the issue at hand, the term “marriage” these days in common use is invoked to suggest commitment to just about anything from opinions and ideas to pets to bad habits to certain brand names. But don’t use that word with regard to your technically unwed partner... especially one of like sex Somehow, magically, the very word “marriage” here is snatched back to its hard legal and/or theological denotation. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard people say things like, “I don’t care who (LGBTs) take to bed or who they live with; and I genuinely support their access to every domestic right and privilege afforded married couples… so long as they don’t use the word ‘married.’” That a couple could be committed to one-another for 35 years, make love, fight, repeatedly reconcile, never cheat, buy a home together, raise kids, anguish over money woes, cry together, pray together, wash each-other’s underwear, share everything from debt to insurance benefits to the flu, amass decades of memories, possibly end up buried side-by-side, and yet have something so intrinsically different than a wed couple that they share at best a “civil union” and are “partners,” but not “husband” or “wife,” again is a quintessential conservative position around this issue.

...And my overall point has been that I suspect some LGBT people who use vague terms about their “partners” do so cognizant on some level that their language must satisfy such social conventions. (Which is NOT to say I’m imagining it as linguistic Uncle Tommery, by the way.
I think it’s important I point that out.)
[Edited 7/14/08 0:09am]

All that said, though, I'd like to co-sign something Anx suggested early on:

Anx said:

Thanks for posting that, Lammastide.