Is “pride” queer or gay? What does it have to do with power imbalance, politics and shame? And what on earth can the Battle of Hastings in 1066 teach us about it?

An etymologist would tell you the word ‘pride’ derives from an Old English word prud or prute, which in turn probably came from the Old French for “brave, valiant”.

In the original Latin, the French word prud was prode, meaning “advantageous, profitable”. It was made up of word parts which had the meaning “to be useful”.

Is anything odd about this so far? Does your use of the word “proud” usually carry this sense?

We don’t use the word pride in as neutral a way as merely “useful”. More strikingly, the negative sense of the word (haughty) is at odds with the sense of useful, profitable.

How and when did this change occur? It seems to have happened post-1066, a time in history when the Anglo-Saxons had suffered defeat from the Normans, who themselves, as Vikings, had previously defeated the French and absorbed French culture.

Before they started using French, these invaders used the Old Norse word pruðr, which also had only the positive sense of “brave, gallant, magnificent, stately”.

It thus appears that linguistic-cultural revisionism occurred when two groups met under conditions of a power imbalance. A word used in a positive sense by one, dominant, culture was appropriated as a term of derision by another, vanquished, culture.

Language acts as a currency to equalise the political, economic and social imbalance that the Norman victory created for the defeated Anglo-Saxons.

Part of the Anglo-Saxon payback for military defeat was the right to call names, to help themselves to the language, to appropriate freely-available words and invest them with new power, the power of scorn to redress the shame.

How does this relate to the gay/queer/pride nexus? Well, we could perhaps draw a parallel with the shift that occurred post-1066 in the semiology of prud.

The mythic image of the knight on horseback as a gallant hero in the Old French prud was replaced by the image of the vain, puffed-up cavalier of the Old English prud.

In current semiotics therefore, the image of the proud gay person, considering pride not just “useful, profitable”, but “brave, gallant, magnificent, stately”, is having grafted onto it a semiotics of political self-identification.

Is this because the proponents of queer pride feel that there is a power imbalance which needs to be rectified? Is the positive iconography of the Old Norse and Old French prud being revised by the negative sense of the embittered Anglo-Saxon prud because gay pride is seen as defeatist and culturally subservient to a liberalist, compliant polity?

Does gay pride have to be replaced by queer pride as part of a dialectic to ensure that we do not suffer shame? If so, we should ask ourselves where that sense of shame comes from.

Is it inevitable? Is it ineffable? Is it imposed by forces outside our control, by an invisible, uncaring hand of economics, by the power of the state, which must be resisted, by media manipulation?

I would argue it is none of these – it is our choice. The shame arises in language, in the choice of words. It arises when we label ourselves defeated, inferior, victims and losers.

It arises when we see ourselves as powerless, and having as our only weapon a revisionist lexicography we can use to re-balance power inequalities – another form of name-calling. It is thus inherently comparative and relative.

Shame does not arise spontaneously in some external world. We choose shame, just as we choose pride, or prud.

So what will you choose?

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