It appears basicly that we were told nowt we didn`t already know.

Interesting. Guilty of an awful lot of this, the Victorians. They replaced a lot of traditional English words that referred to things they considered distasteful and replaced them with new words or imported French words.

For example, bog or lavatory were replaced with "toilet", scent by "perfume" and fukk by "to make love". The latter really gets my goat as fukk is the only traditionally correct word for that act and was only demonised and made into a "swear word" (whatever those really are) by the pious Victorians. I try to use "proper" English as much as possible in a feeble attempt to defy them.

What was the original word for "homosexual"?

If you were gay in Victorian times, you were known as a 'Dally'. Fact.

Gay is late 20th century. A Dally has only become a definition since the advent of this site. Homosexual, we have learned, is Victorian. I think you may have been nearer with your previous attempt. It was the graphic images such words brought to mind they objected to, and brought in the fancier alternatives to disguise the honest truth. Napkin was replaced by serviette, for example, because it sounded to the Victorians too much like nappy.

I refuse to believe that they were talking about this on Airlie nightast night.