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Miss Poubelle is fortunate enough to spend a few weeks in Quebec each summer, and always enjoys brushing up on her French. She's especially enjoyed learning new words related to gay people, and her latest is the curious word gouine, meaning "lesbian." (For non-Francophone readers, the Quebecois pronunciation is approximately gwin, rhyming with twin.) Blanche gathers from her acquaintances that gouine it is about equivalent to "dyke" in English, and is normally pejorative.

Gouine first shows up in French around 1675 as a word meaning "woman of ill-repute" or "prostitute," but becomes a term for "lesbian" in the late 19th century. The etymology takes a few odd twists and turns. Apparently the source is the plural Hebrew word goyim "foreigners, non-Jews," and in Norman French a masculine version gouain was used to mean something like "bastard, asshole." There is a related French word goujat, which originally meant "servant in the army" (valet d'armée), which is also said to have come from the singular of the same Hebrew word goy, meaning "foreigner, non-Jew." In modern French, goujat means something like "uncouth, dishonest person."

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If we thing of the semantic history of this word, it is hard to see how a word that once meant "non-Jew" could now mean "lesbian." But if we look at the history in small jumps, we can see how speakers could have slowly changed the meaning of the word.

The transition from "foreigner" to "uncouth person" is easy. Probably most cultures in the world consider any deviation from the local norms on the part of foreigners as evidence of their crudeness. So any word that means "foreign" or "non-local" is apt to acquire other unsavory meanings as well. From "uncouth" to "prostitute" is also a fairly easy transition to understand. Words for prostitute in English also often come from derogatory descriptions of women. Harlot, for example, originally meant "homeless; beggar," and slut meant "dirty person."

The transition from "prostitute" to "homosexual" is also frequent. Gay originated as a word for "prostitute," and came to applied to homosexual men in the early 20th century. What is surprising to Blanche is that gouine is applied to lesbians, and not to gay men. In English, many words for "male homosexual" come from earlier words for prostitutes, but there are apparently no words for "lesbian" in English that have such an origin.

Nevertheless, the semantic connection is clear -- to the straight and narrow populace of earlier times, all those who practiced some non-standard sexuality were part of the same group of sexual deviants. So transsexuals, homosexuals, and prostitutes constituted a natural class of people, and names for any of the members of this group tend to expand to the others.

Ghetto jive

But what still strikes Miss Poubelle as odd about this story is that the original source of this word is Hebrew. The position of Jews in 17th-century France was terrible. They had been expelled from the country in the 14th century and not readmitted until the beginning of the 17th century. Jews were subjected to humiliations and driven out of some parts of the country by riots.

All of which makes it seem odd that French people of that century would borrow a word for "foreigner" from the language of the people they were oppressing. But perhaps there is an analogy in the word kaffir, which is the Arabic for "non-Muslim." This word was borrowed into English around 1680, probably due to the British Empire's encounters with large Muslim populations in its growing colonies in India. In its early uses, kaffir (sometimes spelled caffre) is mostly used in descriptions of Muslims and their societies, but in South Africa, it became a more generalized pejorative term for black Africans.

Sometimes even large, powerful, and hostile societies absorb important words and concepts from the oppressed minority groups they contain. So while 17th century France was an extremely hostile place for Jews, still a few words like goyim made their somewhat distorted way into the French language. And while gays and lesbians were an oppressed and despised group around the world until the last half of the 20th century, our own special slang still made its way into the larger English language.

There's something encouraging how those at the margins nevertheless help to frame the rest of the culture. As GLBT people move to the center of the cultural limelight, we have cause to celebrate the strong effect we have in every area of society. Yet a word like gouine -- with its old flavor of Jewish oppression, social opprobrium, and prostitution -- reminds us of how long it took our community to get to where it is today.