When I wrote these English blogs, thesaurus.com helped me a lot with finding new words. Howeve, things are not always so simple. Some words are synonyms, but they are not replaceable. One of the typical examples is the word “weird”. I found “eccentric”, “strange”, and “queer” as its synonyms. Before I picked “queer” as the new vocabulary for my blog, I asked my husband if he knew this word. He answered, “Do you mean gay?” That really surprised me because I didn’t realize that “queer” had been derived as a synonym of “gay”. After I looked it up in dictionary, I knew that “queer” is not a polite way to name a guy with homosexual trend. It mixed some negative attitude while addressing homosexuality. When I googled it for further research, I found out another word with similar meaning to “gay”: “faggot”. Even Wikipedia has an entry for “faggot”—a pejorative term and common homophobic slur against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. It will be so awkward if an English beginner randomly picks “faggot” from dictionary without understanding the real meaning.
New Vocabulary:
Queer: odd or unconventional, as in behavior; eccentric.
Pejorative: tending to make or become worse.
Faggot: American slang, a common homophobic slur against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.
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