Homophobia

I'm not an English scholar, but I do take an interest in how we use our amazingly rich language in both the vernacular and in a more refined sense. I remember back in my youth when an very intelligent and very wise pipe-smoking manager of mine you to expound that one needed to be "pacific" when dealing with manufacturing planning. Of course he meant "specific", back then it used to distract me and make me snigger, now it gets on my nerves. Another idiomatic linguistic errors that I come across too frequently, especially in my ancestral area of the South East is, "She won't do nothing!" meaning that the person in question is lazy and won't do anything! Ah, the curse of the double-negative in both Cockney and Kentish dialect!

I wrote some time ago about thoughts on the heinous use of "black" when referring to someone with African or Afro-Caribbean ancestry which was a hangover from less honourable days in the history of the West.

One itch I have been wanting to scratch recently is the use of the term "Homophobia", defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as, "Dislike of or prejudice against homosexual people." A word apparently derived in the 1960's from the words "homosexual" and "phobia".  Phobia, as you are probably aware, is a fear of something, what you may not know is its origin is from Latin via Greek. Arachnophobia for instance is a fear of Arachnids or spiders. If we look at the first part of this blended word things get a little interesting. From an academic perspective the word "Homo" can either mean "human" (Latin) or "the same" (Greek). Things get a little more heinous when you look at the vernacular or common definition with "Homo" defined as "a contemptuous term used to refer to a homosexual, especially a male homosexual." So our definition of those whose sexuality is single-sex could be the combination of a very unpalatable slang-term with the term for "fear". Even in its most acceptable form the word we use transliterates as a fear of those who engage in single-sex relationships. 

On an additional point, the word actually reinforces a fear or division in society that promotes a difference from the perceived "normal".

With the emancipation of those who engage in single-sex relationships shouldn't we go further to differentiate between how we are becoming (at least from a legal position) not just more accepting but re-establishing what is "normal". Equality; equal rights irrespective of age, race, sexual-orientation, creed, colour, ability etc. etc. can be assisted by reframing our language, in the case of "Homophobia" why don't we drop this word, birthed as it was in the cradle of prejudice, and normalise our language whereby sexism, or being sexist includes not just our physiological gender, but our mental and emotional gender, or that sexual-orientation that we naturally are. Sexism, should be an inclusive term in both society, law, and the vernacular language of our country.