What was the nice way of saying it? TBH, I can’t think of one that’s a ‘nice’ word no matter who says it. Some words are obvious slurs (like faggot) but none are obviously nice.
But anyway, I didn’t mean that it was a nice word - poor phrasing on my part; I meant nicely short.
The word “frigg” was a widespread euphemism for “fuck” at the time the book was written – and is still heard from time to time, mostly in the form of "friggin’ ". Thus, “frigate” = “frigg it!” In the book one teacher observes to the other that if you use the term, your class will be pretty much over.
This is essentially the same situation that current teachers might well want to avoid with the term “gay” – which itelf would have been innocuous in 1964.
That’s why in the Futurama universe, Uranus has been renamed:
PROFESSOR FARNSWORTH: I’m sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
FRY: Oh. What’s it called now?
PROFESSOR FARNSWORTH: Urectum.
Norman Mailer used “frig” as a euphemism for another frequently used four-letter word beginning with “f” in The Naked and the Dead, and it slipped into common parlance.
(The story goes that when Tallulah Bankhead met him at a party, she greeted him with “Oh, yes, you’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck.”)
I’m with you. The story linked by the OP doesn’t mention that the kids were being jerks about it (e.g. “Patrick dons his gay apparel all year round! Hur hur!”). If it was kids just giggling at the double meaning, this really misses the point. “Children’s laughter? At Christmas time? I’ll put a stop to that!”
My music teacher did this when I was in fifth grade. It was some other song, not Deck the Halls, but it had the word gay in it and we all dissolved into giggles at that part in the song. Sure, you could talk about bullying and tolerance, but at that age, the reason my music teacher changed the words was much, much more superficial than that: to keep the class under control. Should we be teaching tolerance and acceptance? Yes, of course. But we still need to keep the class under control in the meantime. (Although in the interest of full disclosure, even when the teacher changed the words, we still giggled because we knew what it had originally had said. Damage control isn’t always that easy.)
Back in my elementary school days in the 1980’s, we sang “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again”, which includes the lyric “…and we’ll all feel gay…”, and we were allowed to substitute “great” if we wanted to.
http://kids.niehs.nih.gov/games/songs/patriotic/johnnymid.htm