Language & Context Book

I only picked this book up for research purposes. As a result, I read the entire chapter on sexual taboos, and then skipped around the book looking for information about language about homosexuality. So, take my opinion with a grain of salt, I haven't read the whole book. That said: this strikes me as overly-general, and it relies too much on unproven assumptions. Over and over, the authors will say that a particular euphemism was used, without giving any context to where, when, and why. It's hard to get a nuanced understanding of the words they talk about when the only discussion of them is a long list of euphemisms - many of which, I suspect, have been used in different ways over time and in different places - and there's a short set of generalizations made about them. It also makes it hard to assess where the authors are getting their information from. When you're talking about words that gay communities have reclaimed, there's a lot of tension between people who want to use the words for themselves and people who find them offensive in any context - just look at the debate within LGBT communities over whether or not we should be calling ourselves the 'queer community'. This book acknowledges none of that tension, instead taking one sub-culture's usage (or lack thereof) of any given word as universal within the LGBT community. There is some useful and interesting information in this book, but it's undercut by how general it is, and how incomplete the information feels.