The kids truly are our future

The BBC "News" "BBC News Magazine" is a wonderful source of pointless nonsense. When trawling through some of this nonsense I came across an article called How 'gay' became children's insult of choice.

The basis of this article is; children call each other names; most predominantly in the UK they call each other 'gay'.

My favourite thing about this article is a 'study' produced by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers. The study details the most used terms of insult as observed by teachers in British schools:

My main observation here is that this list does not include any of the following:

Mother Fucker
Cuntface
Shit-sucking ass goblin
Jock
Cum bucket

This makes me wonder if the kiddies are saving the best swears for when teacher's not around. In short, the survey is heavily skewed against the type of vicious, creative swearing I think we can all really get behind.

The next thing I particularly enjoyed in this article is that four of the paragraphs are based around quotes from Mr Tony Thorne. Mr Thorne purports to be a slang lexicographer. From what I can glean this means he's an expert in slang. I assume it's this that allows him the following killer insights into the topic:

(gay is) what we call a 'vogue' word, which is a fashionable word

Every generation grows up with a whole lexicon of homosexual insults, in my day it was 'poofter' or 'bender'

There is one contribution from Mr Thorne that really raises questions for me though.

I have interviewed scores of school kids about this...

So this guy basically hangs around outside schools (unverified fact) and talks filth to children (unverified fact) and (presumably) gets paid for it.

Does anyone know a good slang lexicographer? I really need to know what word is best applied to the above description of Mr Thorne's unorthodox activities.

Two things about this 'article' give me faith however. Firstly:

Gay lobby group Stonewall says 65% of young gay people experience homophobic bullying

It being as low as 65% would seem to be an absolute result for Stonewall. I was honestly backing it to be way higher.

Lastly, some schools introduced a scheme where some of the pupils would volunteer to be part of the scheme and would listen to and support bullied children. These pupils are called peer supporters. Amusingly, in one school:

...they were known as queer supporters

Aah, those children, God bless them, every one.