I thought a faggot was a pile of sticks used in old times to burn homosexuals.
Is this true?
No.
Yes indeed, but we don’t talk about that in polite company.
Moved from General Questions to *Comments on Cecil’s Columns/Staff Reports.
samclem, moderator.
This isnt a comment on one of his reports, but fair enough I didnt see he’d done one.
Quinion, widely respected among etymologists says: "In the sixteenth century, faggot took on associations of being burnt at the stake as a heretic, especially in the phrase fire and faggot. " Later says "The homosexual sense began to appear in Britain in the 1960s … "
And homosexuals are not heretics per se and there is no evidence of people being burnt being called “faggots”.
And, no, the 16th-century idiom “to fry a faggot” is not a case in point; it meant to be burned at the stake, because “fry” at that date meant what we would now qualify as “deep-fat frying”; if you were burned, the fat in your body would liquify and drench—fry—the actual wooden faggots burning under you—or at least it was so imagined.
Whether homosexuals were burned at the stake in olden times, I do not know.
But faggot is definitely a bundle of sticks, for use in kindling or whatever you like. The word fag is still in use in England to mean a cigarette.
People in England say, “I’m just popping outside to smoke a fag”. And they mean they’re going outside to smoke a cigarette.
Sam, here’s a possible origin in a dictionary from 1835
*
Faggot : A term of contempt for a dry, shriveled old woman, whose bones are, like a bundle of sticks, fit only to burn, *
Does that help?
Actually, I’m not sure what that means. Her bones are fit to burn? in what way? I wonder if there’s a superfluous comma there. A shriveled old woman whose bones are *like *a bundle of sticks. That makes a bit more sense. What’s your expert opinion on this, Sam?
yup im english, I say that, just goin for a fag bruv.
Or a durrie.
That dictionary is actually 1883(5). Typical Google false hit for the date.
I don’t see anything wrong with the way it was written. The author used the correct definitions(mainly in England at that time). Why he needed to add a rather misogynistic comment like “whose bones are…fit only to burn,” is rather strange.
Well, we don’t know who the misogynist is—a lexicographer must take words as he finds them. But since he gives no source, we cannot know whether the connection is anything but a wild guess on his part. At any rate, the fact that “faggot” did have, in the 19th century, a connection with old women that was almost ready made for transferring to gay men is well established. (It was also applied to any animal that happened to be annoying the speaker at the moment, such as a cow standing in the middle of a gate the speaker wanted to go through.)