Title
The original code-name for the project was Earthlings, a rarely used slang term for lesbians.
Contemporary use of the phrase "the L word" as an alias for lesbian dates to at least the 1981 play My Blue Heaven by Jane Chambers, in which a character stammers out: "You're really...? The L-word? Lord God, I never met one before."
Historical use of "the L word" as code language can also be found in the sentence of a letter written by Daphne du Maurier to Ellen Doubleday: "By God and by Christ, if anyone should call that love by that unattractive word that begins with 'L', I'd tear their guts out." (Du Maurier, author of Rebecca and other works, was deeply conflicted about her attraction to and unrequited passion for Doubleday, as she would later be about her affair with Gertrude Lawrence.)
Read more about this topic: The L Word
Famous quotes containing the word title:
“There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man’s title to fame. Only those books come down which deserve to last.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Et in Arcadia ego.
[I too am in Arcadia.]”
—Anonymous, Anonymous.
Tomb inscription, appearing in classical paintings by Guercino and Poussin, among others. The words probably mean that even the most ideal earthly lives are mortal. Arcadia, a mountainous region in the central Peloponnese, Greece, was the rustic abode of Pan, depicted in literature and art as a land of innocence and ease, and was the title of Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance (1590)
“It was his title that killed me. I had never spoken to a lord before. Oh, me! what a fool, what a beast I have been!”
—Anthony Trollope (1815–1882)