I’ve been reading up on boarding schools lately and many of those books talk about the origin of “faggot” meaning homosexual. As the column said, “faggot” is an underclassman in British schools that performed jobs for upperclassmen. However, it went a lot further than that. Faggots were used not only for do one’s household chores (make one’s bed, shine one’s shoes, etc.), but also were commonly raped. This is well documented. Only until recently (1960’s) were public schools (what we would call private school here in the US) co-educational (having both male and female students). They were also very much closed societies. Because they were a closed single-sex institution, homosexuality was, by and large, out in the open. Certain boys were considered attractive and pursued as any attractive girl would be by hetero boys today. These attractive boys used this to their advantage. Some of them really were homosexuals, but not all. Many called it simply a phase they went through. These public schools tended to be emotionally and physically brutal on the boys so some looked for ways to make it not so. There are lots of similarities between single-sex public schools and single-sex prisons. Do a search on the term “total institution” for more on this. Anyway…
There were different types of faggots in public schools. To put it simply, one was more of a general-purpose worker and another was assigned to a specific upperclassman (almost always a prefect). Prefects ran the schools … literally. The school depended on them to get things done, keep the students in line, etc. For the school, it was a simple economic decision. They didn’t have to pay the prefects. The prefects did it because it meant power, respect (it didn’t matter to them that the respect was possibly forced), and perks (such as having a faggot do one’s household chores). And as Henry Kissinger once said, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. To be the personal faggot of a prefect meant you got certain privileges and, in that rather brutal society, that attracted some boys to actually wanting to be a personal faggot. Not all personal faggots were homosexuals, but homosexuals or those portraying themselves in such a fashion were heavily represented in personal faggots. Also, prefects choose who were to be their personal faggots and thus the attractive boys were commonly it. Again, homosexuality was pretty much out in the open in these institutions thus how faggot became associated with the word homosexual.
I’d always thought the term “faggot” had evolved from cigarettes because the were something you sucked. Analogous to the term “cock-smoker”. Put a tiny phalus in your mouth and suck on it.
Twin Tattoo. Not a bad theory. But all you have to do is come up with some proof as to how Americans in or about 1914 decide to use the term to refer to homosexuals, and the British, who had a multi-hundred year history of “fags” by that time failed to use it in print. Ever.
Not disputing the homosexuality that no doubt occured in British schools in the 18th/19th century. But the term would almost certainly have appeared in print in slang dictionarys, etc. before it appeared in the US in 1914 if it were truly the origin of the term.
A faggot is a bunch of sticks - a group of homos with erections are a bunch of sticks, stick being an old slang term for slug, woody, cock or penis. And what happens when one rubs a bunch of sticks together? The heat rises. Who knows, who cares?
Somebody, and TwinTattoo, respectively. This board is for questions like that.
I meant to post about the “kindling” definition earlier. In this sense, it can mean “A bundle of twigs, sticks, or branches bound together.”
And with the help of my Encyclopedic Dictionary, that seems to lead to the answer.
In defining fagot, it also says that it can be a verb meaning “To collect or bind into a fagot or fagots,” fagot meaning bundle, and that the derogatory sense of the word was originally used as an insult to women. Short jump from women to gay men in this case, and I don’t think it’s the only insult to make that leap.
It points to baggage, which means “a badly ehaved, impudent, or saucy girl or woman.” This comes from Old French bague, meaning bundle*, or pack. I remember that Shakespeare often used baggage in this sense- I got to call Juliet baggage once when I played Capulet.
If this is correct, it would seem to disprove the explanation TwinTattoo gives in his post. It seems valid to me, since we have “baggage” being used in this way at least 400 years before 1914.
Ah, I failed to read samclem’s column before. But he independently - and with more thorough research, obviously - comes to the same conclusion, so I’m gonna trust that. The dictionary I have here - and it’s a big mutha - doesn’t get into the jump from women to gay men, but it’s in agreement with him about Old French and the Greek term phakelos and pretty much everything else (and it does also mention the meaning that TT discusses, but doesn’t draw a connection because it doesn’t seem like there is one.
It seems to me that the jump from faggot meaning a bundle of sticks to it being a derisive term for a shrewish woman isn’t all that hard to make. Witches were burned with faggots, so it could become a slang term for anyone who was/should be burned at the stake for being an evil woman (i.e. today in polite circles women are referred to as “witches” for being shrewish). So then comes the whole etymology that was int he post about how the shrewish woman reference becomes a reference for homosexual males. The other possibility I thought of relies on current terminology of a homosexual male being a “flamer” or “flaming” due to the ostentatious showing some homosexual males posess. What’s another term for something that’s “flaming?” A faggot.
Classical musicians know that “faggot” means “a bundle of sticks”. The Italian name for the musical instrument we call the bassoon is “faggotti”, because the instrument resembles a bunch of sticks stuck together. When I was in music school I was told that this was the origin of the derogatory version of the word. Supposedly a major northeastern orchestra (probably New York, maybe Philly or Boston) had two flamboyantly effeminate bassoonists, and a society reporter referred to them in a column as “the faggots”. Remember that the early 20th century was the era of the Algonquin Round Table and their incredible wits, so the use of that term in this context is plausible. It is an anglicization of the italian name for the instrument. Apparently readers who didn’t get the joke only saw that the word was associated with effeminate men. Of course, following samclem’s morph from effeminate male to homosexual (a fallacy for another discussion) it is easy to see how the uneducated general public would turn the quip “faggot” into a derogatory word.
Since someone at your music school had singular knowledge that is still unavailable to the body of linguists and etymologist that I know, the world awaits their revealing it to us.
Seriously, if you can remember who “told” you this, please contact them. Was it a professor? A classmate? Ask them to tell you where they read/heard of this story. The story could be true, but suggesting that a society reporter referred to them in a column as “the faggots” just doesn’t wash.
The term appears in 1914. If you can suggest a “society reporter” who wrote a column before 1914 and would have referred to effeminate bassoonists as “faggots” , I’ll do back flips. Heck, just come up with a “society reporter” before 1914.
I’d heard (not from a reputable source, but im sure they’d swear that they heard it from one) that ‘faggot’ was used as a synonym for ‘male fairy’ at one point or another, and that it made the jump to a derogatory term for homosexuals from there (a jump that certainly seems plausible, given the emasculated connotations of fairy). as i say, i have no supporting evidence whatsoever, but has anyone else heard this?
Different etymology, probably spurious (and coincidental):
“Fageleh” is Yiddish for a small bird. A Yiddish-speaking woman I know remembers hearing some older people saying “Look at those fagelehs” (in Yiddish, naturally) and she looked all around for the birds they were talking about (she was a small child at the time). I wonder whether 'fag" entered the American idiom around the same time (early 20th century) that Yiddishisms began to become mainstreamed.
I just wanted to point out that in England (mainly London) that we still refer to cigarettes as ‘fags’.
It’s not uncommon for us to call out to a work colleague “Fancy going outside for a fag?”
For some reason this doesn’t go down to well in our New York office!
I was more surprised to see faggot grouped with fairy and brownie; I’ve never run into an association with supernatural beings before.
I’ve had a suspicion that there might be metonymy involved in some way – a common task for a British public school fag begin to fetch cigarettes from the tobacconist in the days before packaging, when they were bundled (i.e., fagoted) usually with string or ribbon, which seems to be how cigarettes became “fags.” Since it was common for the runner to steal some of the cigarettes, they became fags by metonymic displacement, and the terms “fag” and “faggot” are used semantically interchangeably.
– which would be fine to explain the idiom rising in the British public schools, but not in England.
Part of the problem may be that the terminus a quo we have (appearance in 1914 in the U.S.) is the first appearance in print and not the origin; note that the usage is in its traditional meaning, not an early or primitive sense. It could have originated anywhere and anywhen before then.
My (old American Heritage) dictionary indicates that “faggot” can mean, not just a bundle of sticks, but a bundle of threads used as decoration. My personal guess as to the origin of “faggot” as homosexual male had heretofore been that it originally referred to a man who wore overly lacey clothing – a "faggot wearer, " perhaps. But I must say that the association with British public school catamites is equally appealing. (Note that the Yiddish “fagaleh” is pronounced “FEY-ga-leh,” and isn’t likely to have been the origin of “fag,” though it might well have been associated with it.)
The question of how the schoolboys became “fags” is another riddle, of course. The verb “to fag” (meaning “to exhaust” – in Britain, “fagged out” is “weary”) is associated with this sense of the word in that same AH dictionary; one would guess that that meaning comes from the sense of “fag end” as the frayed end of a rope, presumably associated with the same Middle English root as the bundle-of-sticks sense.
The OED cites “fag” to mean an underclassman serving an upperclassman from 1785. If cigarettes were tied in bundles and the underclassman was sent to fetch them before that date, I’d love to see a cite.
Also, the term used in English schools was “fag” and never “faggot.” At least as far as the OED cites go. I realize that the cites they give are only representative, but they don’t list a cite under “faggot” for an underclassman.
