I’m so old, when I took up English as a teen in school gay was simply a synonym for merry. As fag was slang for a cigarette.
But then at the time my teachers considered the whole of American English to be a degenerated language, anyway. The only way to get in contact was by listening to pop music. The local shops carried not a single newspaper in any foreign language, there were no English books at the local book store except a handful of classics like Shakespeare and perhaps Dickens Oliver Twist, anything else had to be ordered and took two weeks to be delivered.
I’m so old, when I took up English as a teen in school gay was simply a synonym for merry. As fag was slang for a cigarette.
But then at the time my teachers considered the whole of American English to be a degenerated language, anyway. The only way to get in contact was by listening to pop music. The local shops carried not a single newspaper in any foreign language, there were no English books at the local book store except a handful of classics like Shakespeare and perhaps Dickens Oliver Twist, anything else had to be ordered and took two weeks to be delivered.