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Even among native speakers, there are often inter-generational shifts: to my father’s generation (1939) “gay” meant “festive, joyous” rather than a sexual preference; my mother used the term “glory hole” to mean “a cupboard used for storage”[0]; and her mother used “Irish” as an insult, and lived just long enough for “wireless” to start to refer to WiFi instead of longwave radio.

[0] admittedly she was starting to develop signs of Alzheimer’s at the point she called it that around me, but that was a legitimate use of the phrase when she was young.



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