By Nicole Jensen
People in Oak Harbor use a lot of slang words, and I bet most of the people don’t know the real meaning of the words they’re using. My name is Nicole and I’m a student at Oak Harbor High School. People in this generation have become a little lazy with their grammar, using words such as “gay” and “faggot” to get a laugh out of a friend or maybe using a different meaning of the word, and a person that hears it everyday may take it seriously and often end in tragic results.
When people use the word “gay” they usually use it at something that is stupid or something that is worth nothing, and sooner or later it becomes a word that they use daily. Nine of 10 students suffer from verbal harassment at their own school. Some people think that it doesn’t matter saying it at all because it has become such a bad habit for them. But if they really take the time and find out the history and the true meaning of these words, it will shock them and they will really understand what they are saying.
The histories of these words are very terrible. Back when the Salem Witch Trials were going on, they used to burn accused witches and believed that they needed the fire from hell to burn the witch and get rid of all her curses on the town. And how do they get the fire from hell? They used men who they thought were gay and used them as wood to burn the witches because they thought that gay men were so full of the devil that they would provide the fire from hell. There are some people that find the word “gay” isn’t offensive to them, but there are some people out there that take it personally and some situations end in tragic results.
Imagine listening to a song day after day. It gets pretty tiring and you just can’t stand it anymore, right? Well imagine that you were a person that was a transsexual, and had to hear the word “gay” in a negative way almost every single day. You would be a little down. Today in society, transsexual people are put under more and more pressure every day that eventually they crack. Two-thirds of teens feel unsafe at school because of their sexuality and people’s remarks, and some have been physically harassed and assaulted (glsen.com). I have some friends that are transsexual and it really hurts me to think that people treat them like this.
I hope that people really stop to think about what they are going to say before it comes out of their mouths, because they may be hurting someone they deeply care about and not know it. Some people today are still confused about their sexuality and really may not know who they are, and there are some people who use different versions of the word, but it still doesn’t mean that it’s not offensive to a person.
Nicole Jensen is a student at Oak Harbor High School.
