Cocks, asses and gay people
English has, for better or worse, changed the semantics of some words. A cock used to be a male hen, an ass used to be a donkey, and gay used to mean “merry”.
However, in modern English these words have almost entirely taken on new senses, and native speakers have adapted to this. However, I’m told a Parisian museum recently opened an exhibition of photos of cocks (and no, it was not a porn exhibition), and I have encountered language teachers abroad who refused to accept that gay doesn’t mean “merry” any more. This is probably not helped by the fact that dictionaries are often a few years behind, and some list senses by etymology, not by current frequency.
I daringly suggested back in 1993 that we broke away from the English etymological based dictionaries and followed the more ELT frequency based approach in our bilinguals at work. I saw based on corpus that there was absolutely no justification for merry to be the first sense of gay as 99 out of every 100 occurrences a foreigner would meet would be the other sense. Within a month of publication we had had at least 3 letters of complaint, which of course we ignored! I think language has to be descriptive, not prescriptive.