All clear now? Let's hear it: "Thanks for that splendid introduction, Attorney General." Just to muddy things up, the plural of attorney general in Britain is, often as not, attorney generals. Shakespeare, a "son of York" and grammatical colonials all disapprove.
Commending the Supreme Court for its recent decision to strike down laws against consensual adult sodomy practiced by both straights and gays, I wrote, "Homosexuals hail the decision as the law's belated recognition of fairness, which it is, but some would escalate that to American society's acceptance of their lifestyle, which is at least premature."
James E. Humphreys of the University of Massachusetts comments, "I welcome the libertarian approach, but I am somewhat taken aback by your uncritical use of the code word lifestyle ... always derogative in intent (as in `immoral chosen lifestyle')." David Appell of Miami Shores, Florida, writes, "Lifestyle is a politicized, freighted word meant to devalue sexual orientation as a mere choice rather than something intrinsically and neutrally part of human biology and identity."
Though the word is often used in an inoffensive way to categorize people based on their consumer or fashion choices -- a sense popularized by Robin Leach's '80s program, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous -- it is now taken by gays as moral condemnation of their sexuality. The New York Times Stylebook differentiates between Robin Leach and homosexual senses, then rejects both: "Lifestyle is shopworn in references to the values and consumption patterns of the well-to-do. And avoid phrases like gay lifestyle, which imply that all gay men and lesbians live the same way."
The OED's earliest citation is from the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler in 1929, but Arnold Zwicky of Stanford points me to the German sociologist George Simmel's 1900 Lebensstiles.
The word blossomed in the US in the tempestuous '60s, and a June 28, 1970, ad in The New York Times for a book by Dr. Lawrence Hatterer claimed that "Many homosexuals' lifestyles can be changed into heterosexuality."
The trendy word was picked up as a self-description by long-haired hippie groups in beads celebrating their outcast status. They liked to heckle right-wing politicians and were in turn denounced by Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970 for parading those "lifestyles that have neither life nor style." (Who do you suppose wrote that speech?)
The phrase alternative lifestyle, probably coined by gays as a euphemism for homosexuality, has undergone a turnaround. James Hall III of Bangor, Maine, e-mailed me pointedly, "I don't have a lifestyle; I have a life."
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