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It was the Austrian-born Hungarian Karl Benkert / Kertbeny
Károly who started to use the terms heterosexual and
homosexual within pamphlets written to protest against Prussian
antisodomy laws.
That is 157 years ago, and apart from bisexual
no comparable terminological advance has been made on the scale from
hetero- to homosexuality since.
(Here
i am not talking about the relatively recent
androphilia-gynephilia scale which defines sexual orientation in an
ontologically fundamental way.)
Actually, the last decades the players in the limelight have mainly
spawned verbal products which deviate more and more from the (relative)
objectivity and equanimity which Kertbeny's linguistic approach radiated.
People, insiders and outsiders alike, are being 'asked' (without asking
anyone) to digest an increasingly heavier alphabet soup to refer to those
who do not belong to the majority of human beings who consider
themselves (exclusively) heterosexual, (exclusively) male or female and
who equate their (biological) sex with their (cultural) gender.
The initialism GLB, later LGB, is what started it, with
the L of lesbian and the G of gay.
The B of bisexual was in itself a logical and appropriate
addition to the heterosexuality-homosexuality scale, corresponding with
ambiphile on the androphilia-gynephilia scale of sexual
orientation.
It was a semantic irony of fate when this solidly defined extension of
Kertbeny's terminology began to be used in an ambiguous way by
those who are or feel both masculine and feminine which does not at all
apply to the great majority of bisexuals who are cisgender and
attracted to both cisgender males and cisgender females.
As the word homosexual was felt to be too long or too scientific
a word, it was but too blithely replaced with the much more fanciful
gay for men and the more classy lesbian for women in
popular usage.
Too blithely, because, unfortunately, both of these terms belong,
strictly speaking, to an exclusivist vocabulary, however innocuous they
may be (thought to be).
Firstly, provided you are not led by recalcitrance or suffer from trauma,
you simply are not 'gay', let alone happy, because of your orientation as
such: you are happy when you (feminine / masculine) are androphile,
that is, sexually attracted to men or masculinity, and find a
suitable male partner; and/or gynephile, that is, sexually attracted to
women or femininity, and find a suitable female partner.
Secondly, we may expect, that the special association of Lesbos with
'lesbianism' is as trustworthy as the one of 'buggery' with Bulgaria,
even
tho the word derives from that name.
(By the way, why are male homosexuals not called "thebans"?)
Words such as lesbian, buggery and sodomy have their
origins in age-old local, regional and national prejudices which
especially those discriminated against themselves should not perpetuate
by taking them (too) lightly.
(I wonder whether buggery is anglicitis or English
disease in Bulgarian.)
However, it is one thing that there is something wrong with the
ingredients of the alphabet soup, it is quite a different thing, that
the increasing number of these ingredients never seems to stop in a
process which only makes the soup thicker and lose all taste; by lack of
any overall design or comprehensive idea, one may assume.
And then, there is the 'pronounceability' of the names of these soups, or
rather their unpronounceability!
Even our modern keyboards start fully pronounceable from the top-left:
with QWERTY or AZERTY, of which the former can be pronounced
as a word with two, the latter as one with three syllables.
Do you think the name of that proud little English-language newspaper
The Qwerty Times would have been
The Zxcvbn Times if the first six bottom letters of the keyboard
in use had ended up at the top?
Yet, as far as length is concerned, there is nothing wrong with LGB
and LGBT, with the T of transgender: they count no more than
three and four syllables respectively, like element and
elemental.
LGBTI, with the I of intersex was a natural, biological
extension of LGBT after the culturally inspired T.
If mentioned separately at all, it should even have been there with the
L, G and B before the T.
The majority, it seems, gave priority to the Q of queer, a rather
strange ad hoc addition (for those who regard LGBT as too
straight?).
Both initialisms need five syllables for their pronunciation, as in the
word elementalist.
Some claim that LGBT should be followed by two Q's in
which the second Q stands for questioning, which makes the whole
terminological exercise even more questionable.
LGBTQ people may be glad that they made it until here, but LGBTQ
with the Q of queer is definitely not everyone's soup: too many
imagined or found out that they were missing the boat in this way,
apart from the cisgender heterosexuals.
What does a cook do in such a case?
Explain to the guests that it is not possible to keep on adding
everything and anything that is found in the closet, or under the table,
or just happens to pass by!
What does a crook do?
Steal a plus sign from the Department of Mathematics, adding it to the
LGBTQ soup and calling the new brew "an LGBTQ+ delicacy"!
That makes six syllables, as in, for example, elementalistic,
which is not too long, albeit one longer than homosexual,
And while the + tells you, like &c., that you may go on,
it does not tell you how to go on, because there is no system
whatsoever in the preparation of this hodgepodge or 'hotchpotch', in
what must (not) be used or may be added, and in what order.
Therefore, no-one need be surprised anymore that LGBTQ soon
expanded into LGBTQIA+, with the A for no less than a
threesome of the type No sex, please, we're A (asexual,
aromantic and/or agender); plus, again, the plus sign
representing all other minorities or single persons with their own
large, medium large or small idiosyncracies in the field.
The label LGBTQIA+ is as long as a word with eight syllables.
Such words do indeed exist: take elementalistically, for instance,
and idiosyncratically; and, yes, related to attention-crazy
there is idiosyncrasy-crazy.
If you are 'idiosyncratically-inclined', this road to LGBTQIA+
madness may help you in getting a synthetic orgasm; if you are
'elementalistically-inclined' it is more likely to be neither pleasant
nor enlightening.
With the names of the soups becoming more and more unpronounceable and
harder and harder to remember the urge arose to produce a revolutionarily
new soup with no more than one ingredient; like a singleton, a set with
exactly one element, as it were.
The ingredient fashionable (in certain circles) at the moment is the Q
of the monosyllabic queer, a far cry from its octosyllabic
counterpart.
Isn't that odd?
That Q we have been seeing, if not tasting, all the time, in the
LGBTQ soup, in the LGBTQ+ soup, in the LGBTQIA
soup and in the LGBTQIA+ soup.
Yes, it is an unusual pars pro toto which forces itself on
English speakers, and on the speakers of any other language who lack the
suppleness and skill to find a proper translation or adaptation.
It is like calling the Netherlands
"Holland".
Or, it is not, as Holland at least used to be the economically most
important province of the Northern Netherlands in the past.
Since when is 'queerness' the sole or most important characteristic
that all people who are not exclusively heterosexual and/or cisgender
have in common?
And even if it were, since when is it normal to use, or to insist on
using, the name of your own subgroup (never democratically decided on)
for the whole group, or the name of your own group for a whole
'community'?
Sure, it seems 'normal' among exclusivists to use biased terms or a
half-baked, skewed terminology, but must those who are not exclusively
heterosexual and those who are not exclusively cisgender surrender to
such sloppy usage themselves then?
No, Sir; no, Madam; no, dear Person: those Not Exclusively
Cis-HETerosexual are NECHET.
(Forget about NECH, because that could also be read as "Not Exclusively
Cis-Homosexual", whereas those who are exclusively cis-homosexual must
definitely be counted in when it concerns the people traditionally and
historically ignored, maltreated or even killed for being different
sexually or erotically; or who killed themselves, as they could not
bear the ostracism any longer.)
After LGBTQIA+ and such verbal or 'literal' monstrosities,
NECHET is an entirely impartial initialism with the prospect
of working like RADAR in the field of the sexual-erotic waves.
Altho NECHET (adjective and noun) has alpabetic initials as a
base of creation too, in the shape of nechet, pronounced
|NEtshat| with a schwa, it becomes an ordinary two-syllable
word, and an acronym just like radar.
It has the same stress pattern and same ending as scarlet,
secret and violet, all three of them both nouns and
adjectives as well.
(These three words may also be pronounced with
|-it| instead of |-at|
at the end.)
Nechet may be too dull a word for the idiosyncracy-crazy, too
semantically transparent a word for those who prefer the opaque and too
inclusive a word for the pars pro toto characters, so long as it
is the best word to refer to the people it is supposed to refer to, it
has the future.
(While Kertbeny may recognize the het of his heterosexual.)
Nechets, if you do not want a word like queer or a phrase like
member of the LGBTQIA+ 'community' foisted on yourselves, let
alone on the cisgender heterosexual 'community', to refer to people who
are not exclusively cis-heterosexual, from today on you can say with
alliterative emphasis: "Nechets know their name"
(|NEtshats NOH dhar NEIM|).
| * |
Unless its capitalization follows a general rule, i spell the
first-person singular pronoun in
This Language
with a small i, as i do not consider myself a God, a
Supreme Being or anything else of that Ilk.
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| ** |
Where a choice between spellings does not depend on the
application of a morphological rule, i prefer to use the most
phonematic ('phonetic'), or the least unphonematic,
variant.
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| *** |
Letters, or pairs of letters, between vertical bars stand for
phonemic pronunciational symbols.
Capitals represent a stressed syllable, or its beginning when it
overlaps with the next syllable.
The symbols used are those of my
Vocabulary of
Alliteration.
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81.LSE
NOTES
2 Bertrand Russell,
History of Western Philosophy, George Allen & Unwin Ltd,
London, 1961, p.789.
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