Last night I was up too late, and came up with a theory about the origin of the word “faggot” as a derogatory term for homosexuals. I was wondering if it’s possible it was the Anglicization of the Yiddish word “fegele”, which is Yiddish slang for “a gay man, a queer” (Lit.=little bird, IIRC). It’s possible that “fegele” was turned into “fag” and then “faggot” developed from that. The two words sound similar, and in the 1910s-1920s, when “faggot” first came into use, a lot of Yiddish words were coming into English. Anybody want to shoot down my theory or give me the real origin of the word?
I have a feeling it comes from the British boarding-school expression. A “fag” or a “faggot” was the underclassman who would do your (presumably non-sexual) bidding. Where THIS derived from is questionable: British cigarettes are called “fags,” from the word for a bundle of sticks for burning. Could it have come from that, somehow?
Hijack: I was reading a bio of Joan of Arc a few years ago, and it had some of the trial transcripts. To terrorize her into repenting, the priests dragged her out into the courtyard, “where Joan was amazed and horrified at the sight of several flaming faggots.” I nearly choking on the subway reading that . . .
Also in Britain, a faggot is a name for a (huge, rather disgusting and fatty) meatball.
There is no such thing as THE etymology of a word. Paths of development cross, converge, and split.
Someone somewhere probably amused his friends by making a connection between: effete men holding their cigarettes “just so”; homosexuals posing as a come-on; entering schoolboys in Britain being called “faggots” during the course of the traditional hazing; the use of such boys for sex. Perhaps the Yiddish term entered into it as well.
Note that derogatory terms are expected to SOUND derogatory. “Fag” has a sort of “feh!” element, expressing disgust-- like a bad smell. “Pouf” (“poufter”) suggests puffy, silly, overdone hair, blousey shirts, etc.
Then there are the poetic ones like “fudgepacker,” which always struck me as nicely creative.
It would be interesting to get some samples of equivalent words in, eg, Russian, Hindi, Chinese, etc.
Talking about these words calmly removes their power.
Oh-- have to add this idea. Let’s promulgate a new verb for any homosexual act: “to phelp.” I phelp, you phelp, we phelp…
Phelp you.
(couldn’t resist…)
That could turn out to be a real mission impossible, Mr. Phelps. 
This is from Brewer:
faggot a bundle of sticks. In the days when heretics were burnt at the stake, an embroidered representation of a faggot was worn on the arm by those who recanted, thus showing what they merited but had narrowly escaped. Faggot was also applied to a hireling who took the place of another at the muster of a regiment. An old faggot is a dreary old woman.
Bearing all this in mind, here is Cassell on the same subject:
faggot n. [1910s+] (orig. US) 1 a homosexual man. 2 [1950s] (US) a lesbian.
[The word is usually seen as a US coinage, but faggot has an older, if debatable, UK etymology. One, somewhat fanciful, version suggests that a faggot was used in the burning of heretics, and thus became transferred to the name of an embroidered patch (like the pink triangles of the Nazi concentration camps) worn by unburned heretics; homosexuals are certainly considered as figurative heretics, therefore faggot means homosexual.
More feasible is the descent from the 18C use of faggot as a woman (thus playing on homosexual effeminacy), especially in the derogatory form of a ‘baggage’, which stems from the faggots that one had to haul to the fire.
The abbreviation fag may be linked independently to the British public school fag, a junior boy performing menial tasks and possibly conducting homosexual affairs with the seniors.
Finally, there is the Yiddish faygele, meaning little bird (thus the synonym birdie) and thence homosexual.]
Judy Grahn in her book Another Mother Tongue posits another possible origin. She claims that the word comes from an ancient word for birch, referring to birch wands used by ancient pagan priest-type faeries who made happy love with other pagan priest-type faeries of the same sex. It’s been a while since I read it but as I recall the etymology works.
Yeah, but Otto, as the word doesn’t come into recorded usage until the turn of the 20th century, I don’t know if the horny pagan priests had much to do with it.
Scott, do you think that the word sounds derogatory inherantly, or just because it has derogatory connotations?
It took Cassell FORTY YEARS to realize that lesbians existed on the earth???
Some expert…
Partridge gives this:
- A “baggage”; a pejorative applied to a woman (from 1600), also – generally preceeded by “little” – to a child (from 1859)
- A homosexual male, since c. 1960, possibly earlier. Probably from sense 1.
The lateness of the date is surprising, but Partridge is British, so it may have had the “homosexual” denotation in the U.S. earlier.
Flexner says:
“It has been suggested that ‘fag’ = homosexual comes from ‘fag’ = cigarette since cigarette smokers were considered effeminent by pipe and cigar smokers when they were first introduced. Althought this may have reinforced the use of the word, ‘fag’ = a boy servant has been common English schoolboy use since before 1830 and may be the origin.”
Mind you better late then never. Queen Victoria refused to even countenance the possibility of two ladies enjoying physical love.
Which is why the practice was never made illegal under her reign, but maybe you knew that already.
That was for Cartooniverse, to whom I now say it’s possible that it took the US 40 years to realise the existence of lesbianism on this earth.
We covered this recently at Dave Wilton’s Board HERE.
I replied with what I think is a more probable derivation:
[quote]
Using Lighter, I can add what I think will link the use of the term to denigrate a woman and how it morphed into a term denigrating homosexuals.
The term…first appears about a woman in 1591. Lighter cites the term used to “reprove” children starting in 1873. “You little faggot you.” 1892, OED," a term of reproach used to children ."
The 1914 is “All the fagots(sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight.”
So, if you in the 1870-1900 period referred to a young male child as a faggot, you were actually calling him a version of a woman, which term had been used for hundreds of years.
So calling a young male child a “faggot” then a “sissie” could certainly morph into “faggot” being used about homosexuals(by 1914).
A tangent…
One collective noun that applies is “a bundle of faggots.”
–from a New York Magazine contest on collective nouns (IIRC, the winner was “A-cup of Twiggys.”)
Well anyone would know that a faggot is a tightly wrapped bundle of dicks !!! I mean sticks !!!
Jerkcity is your friend.
Captain Amazing,
My opinion is that slang terms catch on because they “sound like what they mean.” Think of sludge, muck, shit, piss, groan, yipe, gulp. In making the sound you can almost “feel” the action, or the thing named. Or consider “stink” or “stench”–you have to wrinkle your nose, as if to a bad smell.
“Fag/faggot” apparently had a prior existence, and the relation between its old and new meanings is a strained one. The reason it got itself adopted is that the “faa-” sound hits the human nervous system as rejecting and dismissive. That’s my off-the-cuff conjecture.
Could a TOTALLY made-up word like “bap” or “prag” get going on the basis of sound alone? Maybe, if enough people think it means something. (No one wants to go first.)
(PS re: “to phelp”-- “phelps” is the third-person-singular formation.)
Actually, ‘piss’ and ‘shit’, to take two items on your list, are only slang terms because of the passage of time & politics. When the Anglo-Saxons ruled England, piss and shit were the English words for those actions. These words, along with others like sweat, fuck, bleed and spit, were replaced by the Latin-based urinate, defecate. perspire, copulate and menstruate following the Norman conquest.
The Latin-based words became the language of the elite, and many of the Anglo-Saxon terms became profane.
–John
This isn’t going to help in the slightest, but Scott Thompson had quite a few sketches on the Kids in the Hall dealing with this word. My favorite is when he mentions that “faggot” used to describe a bundle of sticks. “Throw another faggot on the fire, we used to say.” Also, the “Running Faggot” sketch is pretty funny.
I also thought it was amusing that fascists used to describe facsism thiswise: “Pick up a stick. Now try to break it. Now tie a bundle of sticks togther. Try to break that. You can’t.” And we all know what a bundle of stick is, right? (This is mostly amusing because of the biases fascists have in their thinking.)
But all that cruelly unfair humor aside, I have no idea about the etymology of the word.