“Gay no longer means what it used to mean and I’m sick of it. It’s got to stop”.

The plaintive words of 28 year old Lorcan O’Toole, a young Dubliner who is tired of how the word which describes his sexuality has been hijacked.

Clurmp pride, coming to you soon.

“In recent times the word gay has been used to describe something which is bad or stupid or inexplicably lame”, he told us from his Uphill Gardening centre in Sandyford.

“People might say “Oh, terrorists are gay” or “People who fiddle their expenses are gay” or “Ashley Cole is gay” and they don’t mean gay in the traditional sense of the word. It has become part of the day to day lexicon without anybody stopping to think about how gay people actually feel.

Just last week I was at mass and the priest, trying to reach out to the younger people in the congregation, gave a reading from book of Deuteronomy in which he said:

And Moses went and spake these words unto all Israel.

And he said unto them, I am an hundred and twenty years old this day; I can no more go out and come in: also the LORD hath said unto me, Thou shalt not go over this Jordan.

For it is gay.

I mean, seriously. It’s ridiculous. Its got the point where we need a new word for gay because the old word for gay has been stripped of all its proper meaning. I am proposing that from now on the word gay to describe gay people should be changed from gay to ‘clurmp’. So you can say ‘Oh, one of my best friends is clurmp’ and we can discuss things like ‘clurmp marriage’ and ‘clurmp rights’.

It’s a shocking indication of just how far society has fallen that we would let people simply take over the meaning of a word for their own purposes’.

However, Chairman of the National Lighthearted and Carefree Society, Alan Walsh, said “They’ve got a cheek”.