the idea of using human beings as fuel to burn witches is cruel & inhumane? OK, I think most of us would agree.
the idea of using human beings as fuel to burn witches is unreal, it never happened (or hardly ever)? That seems to be the conclusion of most of the postings here.
-the idea of using human beings as fuel to burn witches is ridiculous, since humans don’t burn as fuel? That puts you right in there with the Holocaust deniers, with their various claims that humans don’t burn well, so there were not enough crematories at the concentration camp to burn that many, etc.
the idea of burning witches is cruel & inhuman punishment? Again, I think most here would agree.
the idea that witches exist is ridiculous? Well, that might get some argument from the doctrinaire Christians here, but I think most SDMB readers would agree.
Which witch statement is it you think is bizarre? What did you mean to say?
Well, geez, am I a Holocaust denier because I think it unlikely that some one would use a human being as a substitute for a dry piece of wood?
There’s a world of difference between the kind of work the Nazis did in figuring out how much body fat could keep a fire going, and just grabbing some one and tossing him on a fire to be used as a,well faggot.
Just to throw in some more food for thought, faggots were bundles of wood, probably firewood, probably a fairly common thing everyone was familiar with back in the pre-electricity “good old days”, anyway, in the book “Tom Brown’s School Days” a particularly nasty form of bullying was to grab a boy and roast him on the fire in the room for a little while and, if you read any of the “Gangland” books, huge collections of true stories about professional criminals, it was not uncommon in fights between British gangs in the early 20th century for some horrible mutilations and tortures to occur (they don’t hang you for that) and I read accounts of gangsters “roasting” other gangsters for a while on the coal fire in a home. It’s not too much of a leap to see “faggot” and “fag” being used as a term of contempt and intimidation for someone, sort of remind them what’s in store for them if they get out of line.
When were the “Gangland” books written? Before 1914? Any cites in them to actual articles, giving dates? But, if they’re about British gangs, why would that have influenced the criminal slang from before 1914 in the US?
I never said the word “fag” or “faggot” was used in the Gangland books or in Tom Brown’s School days, the Gangland books are a collection of what seems to me to be nothing but historical research, pretty much all from press reports, going back to the late 19th century, Tom Brown is from the mid-19th century, I think the slang being discussed could quite easily go back hundreds of years and, not being in much use in polite society, the literary classes, it’s unlikely you are going to find a clear cite for its origin. There’s some interesting speculation in this thread, and the question of how “fag” or “faggot”, usually meaning a bundle of sticks, came to be applied as slang to certain people, junior errand boys at British public schools and gay men, is going to be tough to answer conclusively. You may well be dealing with a very old oral tradition that would not have been documented until the 20th century.
This is an area of inquiry I really enjoy and I fear that in this case you are going to have to be satisfied with your own conclusions from circumstantial facts. I checked my two Bill Bryson books on the English language and the only reference I could find was to English cuisine… “faggots and gravy”.
Fyodor, that happens once in TBS when Flashman does it to Tom Brown. It’s presented as a uniquely horrible act of violence by the school psychopath. I don’t remember any suggestion that it was a common practice and you would not, in any case, put a “faggot” of wood in a fireplace - you would use individual pieces or, in mid-1800s England, probably coal. Inventive thinking but a bit of a stretch. Other books including the word “fag”, such as “Stalky & Co.”, only indicate that the junior boy was considered as an available resource for petty housework and so on - not that he was vilified and held in contempt under the threat of appalling torture.
Yes, bizarre. At the risk of putting words into Rube’s mouth, the notion which he is denouncing as bizarre goes something like this:
1: Witches don’t burn very well by themselves.
2: Therefore, something else must be burnt as well, in order to burn the witch.
3: Even ordinary wood doesn’t burn well enough, so we need something which burns better than wood.
4: Homosexuals burn better than wood, and so throwing homosexuals onto the fire will suffice to burn the witch.
In order for this to make sense, we must simultaneously assume that witches do not burn well, and that homosexuals do burn well. Does this make it clearer why this notion is bizarre?
I may regret this (for several reasons), but I’m going to add a piece of relevant data.
There existed, in the 16th century or so, an idiom “to fry a faggot”. “To fry a faggot” meant to be burned at the stake. Note that the use of the word “fry” to mean “sautée” is a modern Americanism; the original sense of the word is what now has to be expanded into “deep-fat fry”. So “to fry a faggot” was to drench the burning wood beneath one in one’s own melting body fat.
(Unfortunately, some people with a quasi-religious need to “prove” the “faggot”-from-burning theory lie outright about what the expression meant. One can only pity them.)
The expression “fry a fagot” is actually cited in the OED from 1621, and was in a polemic written by Richard Montagu against John Selden and Selden’s arguments against taxes.
The exact cite was
Fyodor. The origin of the term fagot to refer to male homosexuals is American. British gangs burning rivals had nothing to do with it.
You lucky lucky kids- you get to hear it straight from the (well, a) horse’s mouth. As a native-born Englishman who wwent to public schools which openly acknowledge fagging (to the point of a “fagging rota” drawn up weekly by the Housemaster being hung on the House noticeboard), I have to say that Malacandra has it quite right. “Fag” is in common usage to signify a junior student who is assigned various unpleasant tasks- these days, they tend to be things like mopping the dining hall floor rather than more… personal duties (ie. bog-seat (toilet seat) warming when its cold). “Fagging” refers to the practice thereof. “Faggot” is a disgusting meatball-like creating, a bundle of kindling, or what Americans call a gay man. If you mentioned a faggot to the average Brit, they’d take it to mean a homosexual. If you mentioned a fag, they’d hand you a cigarette. I still do, and I’ve lived Stateside nearly nine years.
Perhaps most importantly, I’ve never heard of fagging representing sexual favours. Read Roald Dahl’s memoir of public school life, Boy - he wrote it about his experiences in the thirties and he doesn’t mention sexual favours either.
I’m not saying that the prison-sex phenomenon is unknown to boys-only schools, just that fagging isn’t related to it.
Fyodor Sorry to have sounded imperious. To build on what JWK said above, the term fagot to mean a homosexual is almost certainly American in origin. Why, we don’t yet know. If it were British, one would have expected to see it in print there somewhere in the 1900-1945 period referring to homosexuals, but it doesn’t. Rather, it appears in US cites with some frequency in this period.
May you be forgiven! I admit that, like English sausages (maybe all sausages), haggis, black pudding, and perhaps one or two other foodstuffs, it’s best not to enquire too closely as to the composition… but I could demolish a small mountain of faggots, hot or cold, and relish every crumb. “Disgusting”, forsooth! :eek: