Lesbians opposed to lesbianism
Lesbos islanders want to stop homosexual women calling themselves Lesbians. There’s a video report by the BBC about this story, jump to 1 minute and watch as an old Greek dude expresses his proud identity as a Lesbian, at which point the interviewer asks if he’s a lesbian.
Labels: bad humor
What about the Papuans who speak the language Anus?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anus_language
Lesbians (the islanders) are insulting their most famous citizen ever: Sappho of Lesbos. True that she had to flee for her life in the past anyhow, so it doesn’t seem that Lesbians were ever much pro-Lesbian – ih, oh!
Siracusans were more hospitable.
In any case (some) Greeks seem to be really nitty-picky about using historical terms that have anything to do with them. Beware all you whose name is Alexander, Philp, Plato, Homer, Archimedes… well, one could well argue that Archimedes was Italian anyhow.
And in other legal news, the citizens of Bull Dagger, Iowa …
I think they’re not so much “against lesbianism” as “against a common use of the word ‘lesbian’”. Nitpicky, I know. Although, for all I know, they could be against that as well.
I think I read somewhere that one of the three people who initiated the court action is the publisher of an anti-christian nationalistic magazine.
From what I have read, they are perfectly happy with female homoeroticism but don’t like the way their island’s name has been hijacked. Let’s give them a break. After all, we no longer call people suffering from Downs Syndrome Mongols. (No, I don’t regard female homoeroticism as a disease; that was just another example of placename hijacking.) But their plea will fail. You can’t yank a word bodily out of one language, let alone a hundred languages, if it has a constituency of eager users.
The case is that term Lesbian is very old and widespread. You can’t defeat common usage with court action, really. I find that extremely silly, specially as they should be proud and not ashamed of Sappho.