I have also read that a faggot is a young pupil in a British public school who’s required to perform certain menial tasks and submit to the hazing of an older pupil, and have wondered if the homosexual referencing may have in some way had its source in this.
Such a person is referred to as a ‘fag’, never, in my experience, a ‘faggot’.
This thread is referring to the Staff Report linked in today’s Straight Dope e-mail:
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mfaggot.html
I’m moving it to the proper forum.
Jabba, is “fag” not short for “faggot”?
Regarding the column about the term faggot referring to gay men, I wonder if the missing link might be found in the concept of hindrance. I.E., the heretic having to carry the bundle of sticks > schoolboys having to do grunge work for upperclassmen > a ball busting woman > a spoiled or demanding child, then, upon entering the gay realms, an annoyingly shrill or flamboyant gay man, AKA Little Richard or Richard Simmons. (Well, they’re both shrill and they both annoy me, at any rate.) I don’t know why it is, but for some reason when I hear the term fag, as opposed to faggot, what immediately comes to my mind is the term fagged out', British slang for being tired or exhausted. In the gay communities that I'm familiar with, meaning American gay men, the worst insults are to refer to the target using terms generally reserved for women. I don't recall ever hearing a gay man insult another gay man without using the term she’ to refer to the target. The C word is often used, and of course `Bitch’ is almost universal. (Which, as a woman, pisses me off no end, but that’s for another thread entirely) So my theory, which is all of five minutes old and born of reading the column, is that men in the gay community referred to those who annoyed them as faggots in reference to a demanding woman and when the term leaked to the straight community, it eventually began to be applied to all gay men to the point that it began to refer to them exclusively and eventually became entirely pejorative.
As I said, it’s a theory I came up with while reading the column and I’m sure there’s plenty of holes in it. I look forward to having it ripped apart by the Teeming Millions to see where I’ve gone wrong.
Irishman: In British English, ‘fag’ had two meanings that I can think of. One is the junior pupil who had to perform menial tasks for a senior pupil at certain schools. The other is a slang word for a cigarette. I have never heard ‘faggot’ used for either of these.
‘Faggot’ also had two principal meanings ( checking Chambers dictionary, I see a few others I’ve never seen used): a bundle of sticks for fuel, and the meat food product that caused such amusement on these boards recently.
More recently, the American word ‘faggot’, and its abbreviation ‘fag’, derogatory terms for a male homosexual, have entered British slang through US films and TV shows. They are words here which are recognised and understood rather than used ( British queer-bashers preferring home-grown insults).
A Dictionary of English Slang has this to say:
It agrees that it was originally American.
The Italian name for a bassoon is “faggoto” because the instrument resembles a bundle of sticks…
I remember when I played the bassoon in high school and college, I would occasionally get handed a piece of music that was labelled “faggot” instead of “bassoon”.
in a america we refer to very effemiate gay men as flamers or flaming fags. Is this the connection to the burning bundle of sticks??
Surely not, since we know that the term ‘faggot’ as slang for gays is older than that. (See above.)
I can’t cite it, but I bet the term “flamer” and is much newer.
I always assumed that “fag” came from an Englishman at some point and referred to the junior classmen. Buggery in boarding schools (English and otherwise) is legendary, so a Best Boy’s “fag” would very likely have to polish things other than his shoes upon occasion. Seems logical.
[hijack]I’ve read several theories of origin on the word “drag” in the transvestitism sense. One theory is that it originated in ancient Greece where sex offenders were castrated by having their testicles “drug” out with a device called a “spao” (literal meaning: drag) and that from this moment on they had to dress in women’s or in gender neutral clothing and were known as a “spao”, or drag-man. This seems unlikely as it means the word would have to survive numerous translations and thousands of years.
Another is that it refers to the hem of a dress dragging the ground, but that one also doesn’t quite work as most drag queens don’t wear flowing gowns and more women have worn them through the years by far than men. Anybody have any other theories?
[/hijack]
Actually, that’s what I read. If you ref. some Victorian literature you will find that under-classmen that “fagged”* for upper-classmen were often sexually abused by them; hence, “fag” and “faggot” came to mean a young man who was sexually assaulted by his superior. Actually thought this was pretty obvious and have read it in text books on Victorian Lit. before.
*You “fagged” for the upper-classman because one of your tasks was keeping the stove in his room fed with faggots.
i read all of this and just can’t help myself. the term faggot would have been used on a ball bustin wife because of what the term means…lets all go back to Aesops fables. the old man and his two sons. … a bundle of sticks, or faggot, is hard to break.
so the term came about for women because they didn’t always do what their husbands wanted. therefore i can easily conclude as how the word faggot can be used on a woman or small child. they display the properties of a bundle of sticks.
Bassoonist (and P.D.Q. Bach creator) Peter Schickele says it’s because most people who attempt to learn the instrument end up using it as firewood.
Probably “Fagot,” which is the German word.
Meanwhile, samclem mentions the Yiddish faygeleh, noting “the claim that the word was commonly used in Yiddish prior to WWII to indicate a homosexual.” I’ve certainly seen the word used to mean a gay man in much more recent writing, although I couldn’t discount the possibility that that usage was influenced by the American “faggot” rather than the other way around.
The use of “fag” as slang for cigarette in the USA didn’t stop in the 1940s. When I was at college in 1967-68, the upperclassman down the hall talked about coming home for vacation and finding his high-school-age brother “with a beer in his hand and a fag hangin’ from his mouth”.
As for “flamer”, it’s a pretty new term, yes, but “flaming faggot” goes back at least to the 1960s.
I’ve always wondered whether the phallic image of a bundle of sticks might be connected with the popularity of the term.
Italian: Fagotto
German: Fagott
French: Basson
Since an awful lot of music has been printed in Germany (or German-speaking countries) and Italy, not to mention written by German-seaking or Italina composers,Italian and German words for bassoon are commonly found on scores and parts, especially in orchestral music. Some American publishers merely reprint originals, thereby keeping the German or Italian terms.
Knorf
(a bassoonist)
I’d heard that the origins of the term ‘Faggot’ lay in the term ‘Faggoting’ - a sewing term. I seem to remember it means something along putting some lace on a seam. Cecil didn’t mention this term as a possible sorce. Anyone have any history on this?
Depends on how old the sewing term is. If the sewing term and the “bundling” thing have the same origin, it’s sort of redundant.
Cecil probably didn’t mention it because I wrote the article(nice to be thought of in the same stratosphere, though 
).
The OED cites a “faggot-stitch” in 1903 as a sewing term.
I’m not sure how that would have lead to homosexual males being referred to as “faggots” —unless that was the common stitch used to make dresses for a transvestite ball in the US.
I had learned that the term ‘faggot’ as applied to homosexuals was connected to the pratice of burning at the stake.
When heritics were burned, accused homosexuals were added to the fuel (wood) as the whole thing was assembled or thrown on afterward. It was thought that gay men were not as deserving, as say, a witch, who would be in the center of the spectacle.
Since the fuel was bundles of wood called ‘faggots’, the term applied to the men who were used as such.
From: http://www.bctf.ca/publications/SJ-InEveryClassroom/archive/2002-03/2002-12-01.html
“During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the burning of suspected of being witches was common practice. As the fires raged, men suspected of being homosexuals were thrown onto the pyres (to make the flames burn more fiercely) along with faggots of wood.”