I am a Fag

Not a day after I abandon the idea of a blog deconstructing cruel, ugly language do I find out that the arch-conservative poster child for all things cruel and ugly in America today, Ann Coulter, is way ahead of me.

She who has called former VP Al Gore a "total fag" and presidential candidate John Edwards a "faggot" had this to say on the show Fox news show "Hannity & Colmes": "The word I used has nothing to do with sexual preference...and unless you're going to announce here on national TV that John Edwards, married father of many children, is gay, it clearly had nothing to do with that."

Translation: Just because you think I said I think he's gay doesn't mean I think he's gay or even that I said that just because I said faggot; maybe you think I think he's gay because you think he's gay even though faggot does not mean gay and anyway I am part of the right-wing establishment that can grease its way through any tight space and way beyond all accountability.

The walls of the home of this one-woman conservative think tank must be lined in rubber.

So what does faggot mean? Is it a new acronym--Friendly, Amiable, Good? Does it mean anybody outside the fascist mindset of conservative America? Let's start there if only because we have so little to go on this morning. Count me in. I'm a big ol' faggot, and I'm proud to be among the faggotty fags of the world--even if I am a married woman with a child and fag doesn't mean what you think it does,you dirty-minded liberal.

Aside: Remember the good old days, when language was the tool of communicatin, the effectiveness of which depended on agreeing the meaning of the words we use? There's no looking back.

How right that a conservative thinker should tell us that language means what she tells us it means. Meanwhile, though, I'm pretty sure I'm a faggot and kind of relieved.

This just in: Please visit Hasty Ruminations for another insight into one of Coulter's insights.