Ecce homo, ad hominem
OKAY, I know it’s annoying and pretentious to chuck Latin phrases around, but there is a point to the headline above. A friend of mine was incensed when some people called him a “homo”. (“Where have they been?” he fumed. “Haven’t they heard of ‘gay?’ ”) So I thought I’d investigate and find out just how insulting the word actually is.
Any innocuous word can be an insult, of course. Say it in a particular way and you could be punched for calling someone a lettuce. “Homo”, in its salad days, was not even a word, but a word-forming element, as the Online Etymology Dictionary puts it. Homo came from the Greek homos, meaning “one and the same”. Its function, when put in front of another word, is to indicate sameness, or equality — which is quite the opposite of its intention when used by bigots with lettuce for brains.
You should be able to attach homo to almost anything in order to describe something else similar to it. A car that looks the same as every other car on the road (and face it, most of them do these days) could be called a homocar. A siamese kitten from a litter of identical siamese kittens could be a homocat.
A homosexual, in the true grammatical sense of the word, is someone who loves people of the same sex. A homophobe, by extension, is someone repelled by anything, or anyone, the same as them. Which, effectively, makes all homophobes homosexual. But, like lettuce, words never remain pure and crisp for long, so we’re probably stuck with homophobes not understanding what it is they hate.
More than a century ago, psychologist and social activist Havelock Ellis wrote: “‘Homosexual’ is a barbarously hybrid word, and I claim no responsibility for it. It is, however, convenient, and now widely used.” What a cop-out. If someone called Ellis’s mother a toad, would he shrug it off as a convenient, widely used word?
But back to homo. A homograph is one of two or more accepted English words which are spelt the same but have different meanings and are pronounced differently. There’s a long list of these: affect, bow, tear and wound are four of them.
A homophone might sound like one of the identical communication devices that blossom around us (trying to tell them apart is like comparing apples with apples), but it is in fact a word that sounds like another word, but with a different spelling and meaning. Hay and hey, stake and steak, rain and reign are all homophones — as are many other pairs that get mixed up in the wash just to torment us word protectors.
Then there are homonyms, which are spelt and pronounced the same, but mean different things. Book, cave, trip, trunk. I could go on, but I won’t. All this was just to show how a simple word-building brick like homo, the same as any other brick, can build a lot of different walls. Ecce homo, by the way, is Latin for “behold the man” and ad hominem means “to a man”, although it’s probably easier to say everyone. The Latin world took homo and applied it to only one gender, but we have mostly reclaimed it. Homo sapiens is translated by most modern dictionaries as the genus of human beings, or mankind. The odd part of this classification is not the homo part but the sapiens part. It comes from the Latin sapere , meaning “to be wise”. Replace the “m” in homo with an “h” and you have my response.