To mark the eve of Pride Month, this digital composition passed on by Steven Levine on Facebook today:
Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in the 7 ROY G. BIV, or Newtonian rainbow, colors, rather than the 6 Pride Flag colors — so the composition was probably not intended to celebrate the wonderful LGBTQ+ness of June; but let’s just disregard that
Now, the composition supplies a number of tokens of the Queen Elizabeth II type, so I had to consider whether my title for this posting would be Queen’s Pride (one QEII type) or Queens’ Pride (many QEII tokens). This is a familiar sort of problem, cropping up annually when Mother’s / Mothers’ Day and Father’s / Fathers’ Day come around, and I’ve chosen the same solution for my title that I chose for those two commercial holidays: axe the damn apostrophe. It’s Queens Pride.
(By the way, I have no source for this composition, but that’s characteristic of memic material, which gets handed around by word or passing from hand to hand, as cultural material that belongs to everyone.)
And now for something completely different. A ton of word play. Much of it tapped by Julian Lander on Facebook today:
JL: Is the collective noun for this “a pride of queens”?
Calling on this sense of pride (all definitions from NOAD):
(collective) noun pride: … 5 a group of lions forming a social unit.
but in a context where these senses are the relevant ones:
noun pride: 3 [a] [often with modifier] confidence and self-respect as expressed by members of a group, typically one that has been socially marginalized, on the basis of their shared identity, culture, and experience: the bridge was lit up in rainbow colors, symbolic of LGBT pride | a celebration of Latino pride | the underlying theme of the song is black pride. [b] [AZ: often capitalized] a public event, typically involving a parade, held to celebrate LGBT identities, culture, and experience: I went to pride as a teenager before I was ready to come out.
In any case, with pride used in combination with the most frequent sense of queen:
noun queen: 1 the female ruler of an independent state …
— though in this gay context, the following sense always lurks in the background:
noun queen: 5 sometimes offensive a gay man, especially one with an ostentatiously affected, flamboyant, or feminine manner.
JL then takes things further afield:
I am unable to resist adding that this Sunday, June 2, is, in fact, Queens Pride. It is the one day of the year on which I point out that I am from Queens in the sense that it was the first place I lived after my birth (the hospital at which I was born is in Manhattan).
Thus introducing:
(proper) noun Queens: a borough of New York City, at the western end of Long Island
And adding:
So does that make me the pride of Queens?
Thus using pride as a type of noun with both head and modifier characteristics:
noun pride: 4 literary the best state or condition of something; the prime: in the pride of youth.
All of this is developed conversationally, on the fly, not as carefully worked-out jokes, so queen / Queen and pride / Pride slip from one meaning to another.