I have to ask, when did “gay” become a synonym for “bad”? I realize this has been going on for some time, but nobody checked with me first. Today even kids who are not at all homophobic will say without thinking, “That’s so GAY.” Now I hear middle-aged men doing it, too. “That SO gay.” Yeah, pull your thumb out of your mouth, guy. That might have been marginally cute if a 5-year-old said it. When a 45-year-old says it, that’s just sad.
Allow me to seemingly digress for a moment.
A term you’ll hear a lot if you shoot USPSA or IDPA is “gamer.” Almost invariably used by a weaker shooter to refer to someone who‘s just beaten them. Why “gamer” should be a pejorative term since USPSA and IDPA both are, in fact, games has always eluded me. Near as I can figure, “gamer” means, “Anyone who just outshot me with a gun that has at least one part on it that my gun doesn’t, is shooting a 9mm, is shooting a gun that cost more than mine, or is physically larger than mine, shot the stage in a way requiring a higher skill level than I possess, or in a more efficient fashion that I didn’t figure out because my stage doping skills suck.”
There seems to be a certain sort of shooter who can handle it if you out-SHOOT them. They won’t be happy about it, but they can live with it. But they absolutely come unglued if you out-THINK them, if you shoot the stage in a more efficient way than them because you looked at the problem, and you figured out how to solve it in a way they couldn’t. “Because that’s UNFAIR, man. No one should ever be smarter than me. And no one should ever be able to figure out things I can’t. Everyone should have to shoot the stage the EXACT SAME WAY AS ME.” Sniff! (Wipes away tears while their wower wip twembles.)
I have a term for those shooters who call other shooters “gamers.” I call them “losers.”
On IDPA message boards these days, apparently the currently “witty” comment is to say, “So-and-so is a GAY-MER.”
Really?
Gay-mer.
How old are we here?