I’m reading an early 20th century British Translation of Jules Verne’s Adrift in the Pacific (AKA Two Years’ Holiday), and I’ve come across one of those cases where the meaning of the words have changed, creating unintended humor. It’s on page 26:
I keep trying to be adult about this, and say that it’s simply a change in the language, and that surely later 20th century slang can’t be relevant here, but the damned passage keeps taunting me. These two young boys have intimate knowledge of faggism (snicker).
Every information of the fag (snort) and how to treat him (ha) can be obtained gratis (extended laugh) from Messrs. (what a foppish way to put it) Webb and Wilcox (this is Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint).
Can anyone tell me what the real meaning of “fag” and “faggism” is in this context? The only other meanings I know are
yep…this is an old and honorable meaning of the word.
To be a fag was to be in the service of an older person. To be the butler, janitor, and most importantly,— the empty-er of the chamber pot every morning.
It was a status symbol to have a fag serving you, and a sign of low-status if you were required to fag for someone else.
The system was based on the traditional order of British society, with its rigid classes and aristocratic disdain for commoners.
Because, after all, somebody had to empty the chamber pot… :).
British schoolboys used to grow up reading the “character-building” stories of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.-- which is pretty scary to modern eyes…( and the constant fagging is only one small reason why)
In this case, a fag is a junior pupil at a school acting as a servant of sorts to a senior pupil. Note that a fag is not necessarily a personal servant but may be a junior on duty who responds to a cry of “Fag!” or “Boy!”
The first lines of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” also now have unfortunate implications.
“They used to tell me I was building a dream
and so I followed the mob
When there was earth to move or guns to bear
I was always there, right on the job . . .”
The edition I have is a Sampson and Low, like that one, but the illustratioons are different, and they’re black and white.
Jules Verne was an incredibly pro;lific writer, turning out more than a book a year, on average. I have and have read maybe 2/3 of them, but I hadn’t read this one before. I just picked it up in a used book store.
Similarly, “making love” had a different meaning. You’d find passages like “Mother smiled as she looked out the window and saw Mr. Pritchett making love to her daughter on the porch.”
“Making love” meant something more like “proclaiming romantic interest” or “making googly eyes.”
You can read some stories about what a fag had to endure in Roald Dahl’s autobiography Boy.
One of these things was to “warm a seat” for a teacher in the Bogs (or maybe Boggs, it’s been awhile). Essentially, some toilets were outdoors, and some teachers sent boys go sit on the toilets to warm them when they felt a dump coming on. Roald Dahl describes brushing the ice off the seat and then sitting for awhile. The teacher comes, and a conversation along these lines ensues:
T: Is it warm?
RD: As warm as I can make it, sir.
T: You know, some fags have cold bottoms, and others have warm ones.
He then sits on the seat, and discovering that it’s warm informs RD that he makes a point to remember warm-bottomed fags. RD then goes on to explain that the teacher did remember him, and RD had to warm up the toilet several times.
Oh, I almost forgot. One of the ways in which the unfortunate fag is chosen to complete whatever task is that the task-giver (I forget if upperclassmen could do this, or only teachers-- who I think were called prefectures) would just stand somewhere and yell fag at the top of his lungs. This leads to a line in this book which contains, “FAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaag!”
I should not be at all surprised if the American slang “fag” (=homosexual) actually derives from the practice of having younger boys work as fags (=personal servants) to older boys in British public (=the oldest and most prestigious private, boarding) schools. As boys only boarding schools, British public schools have always been notorious hotbeds of homosexuality. When you put an older adolescent boy, filled both with testosterone and a sense of entitlement from his upper class origins, and isolated from all female contact for months at a time, in a position of almost total power over a younger boy who is just beginning to get oriented in this strange new society into which he has been thrust, the results are predictable (especially as the older boy had probably been subject to the same thing when he was younger).
Incidentally, when I was growing up in Britain (not in the public-school-going upper classes, thank God), the word “fag” mostly meant cigarette. I remember hearing a story about a British celeb (I forget who), getting off the plane in New York and immediately announcing to his hosts, “I’m dying for a fag.”
