Defending monosexuals (was: YAEPT: uu/ii )

Eugene Oh wrote:
> "Monosexuals" is a funny word!
I do not see why "monosexual" is any more or less funny than "bisexual".
The latter was, when I was young, and adjective meaning 'having both
male & female sex organs', i.e. hermaphrodite. Over the last half
century the word has shifted to mean 'attracted sexually to both sexes.'

On the analogy of homosexual & heterosexual one would've expected
'attracted sexually to both sexes' to be *amphoterosexual, but it ain't;
and shifts in meaning happen all the time in living languages,

> The imaginative boundaries for that are
> practically non-existent.
No more, meseems, that for 'bisexual' if one wants to be imaginative.

> Is a monosexual someone who...
>
> (a) Has only one sex as opposed to the rest of the world, which has two or
> more?
?? Surely most people in this world have only one sex, either male or
female. Hermaphrodites, i.e. bisexuals in the older meaning, are a
minority. Most of us on this list, I guess, are monosexual, i.e. have
only one sex, as opposed to bisexual in the sense of 'having both male &
female sex organs'.

> (b) Has sex once?
Yeah, yeah - kinda like a bisexual has sex only twice!

[snip]
> On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 12:21 AM, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote:
>>> I found that a tad offensive... but maybe it's just me.
>> I'm sure Roger meant nothing by it, but yeah, one reads an implication
>> that bisexuals are somehow more likely than monosexuals to carry
>> viruses.  Which is indeed an offensive assertion...
Surely Mark's coinage of monosexual is quite logical in view of the
contemporary meaning of 'bisexual'. It's also IMO very neat as it
encompasses both heterosexual and homosexuals.

FWIW my original remarks about bi and bii were simply making fun of the
not uncommon pseudo-Latin plurals of _virus_, thus:
bus ~ bi, on the analogy of virus ~ viri
bus ~ bii, on the analogy of virus ~ virii

--
Ray
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fieri per pauciora.
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