Prefects (not “prefectures”) in British schools are certain final year students who are given some special responsibility for maintaining discipline amongst the other students (in exchange for certain privileges). Usually they are marked in some way, by badges or modified uniforms (prefects in my high school had yellow piping round the edge of their uniform blazers). The prefect system has no particular connection with the fagging system. Both my high school (boys only, but not a boarding school) and my primary (=elementary) school had prefects, but it would have been unthinkable for there to be anything like fagging (and quite regardless of any homosexual implications).
According to C. S. Lewis in Surprised By Joy, his school experience was that very often fags in this old sense had to act as fags in the modern sense.
A prefecture is a particularly large prefect.
As a member of the public-school-going-upper classes, I was in the interesting position once of smoking a fag while fagging, in the company of a fag.
By the time I went to public school (up to '99), fagging had devolved into scheduled cleaning tasks which the first-year students were expected to perform. The housemaster or one of the prefects used to post a schedule with names and weekly tasks. One kid would be cleaning the kitchenette, one had to mop the changing room floor, etc.
One day I was performing my assigned fagging task, which was cleaning out the designated smoking area at the rear of the house, and smoking at the same time. The other kid who was assigned to help was gay.
I grew up knowing only the sense of “saying something short, explosively” for ejaculation. In Parochial School, they used the word constantly and without a touch of irony or apparent awareness that there was another meaning to the words.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” was considered a typical ejaculation, and was counted as a holy act (as opposed to saying “Damn!” when you were surprised, which was a sin). The nuns were constantly ejaculating, and urging us to do the same.
In fact, we were urged to make “Spiritual Bouquets” which listed the numbers of prayers of various sorts we were to make on someone’s behalf, or in their memory – 5 Our Fathers, 25 Hail Marys, 50 Glory Be’s…
… and 500 Ejaculations. They were always urging some ridiculously high number of them
You’re sniggering your head off, aren’t you?
But this was for real, and was at the time, for all of us kids, at least, the common and accepted use of the word. Not so long before, it was the common and accepted use in society as well. My copy of Robert E. Howard’s Conan includes, in the story “Rogues in the House”, the line “Conan ejaculated” (upon seeing the ape-man Thak). I don’t think he was sexually exvcited by the sight (although, at the time I first read it, I was learning the other uses of the word, and I had a twinge of doubt). So in the 1930s you could use it without fear of double entendres.
Nowadays I seriously doubt that nuns urge kids to ejaculate 500 times for anyone, and a hero will only ejaculate in an adventure story if the author is looking for a quick laugh. Using such a word UN-ironically would be pulling a real boner.
I think the expression is “Keep your pecker up.”
Born in '83–we referred to this sort of thing as an “interjection.”
does secret Millenial handshake with SFG
The OED disagrees, saying it comes from “faggot,” which clearly came first. Also, “fag=homosexual” first appeared in the US, where the practices of British public schools did not exist and were pretty much unknown.
“Gay” meaning “cheerful” has been displaced and phrases like “The Gay Nineties” have faded away.
I’m an American and had never heard the word “prefect” in this context until I read the Harry Potter books. Until my cousin married an upper-crust English guy (his parents are Sir Donald and Lady Ruth). At a pre-wedding brunch, I was chatting with my cousin’s husband’s cousin and he was telling me about his school, which my cousin’s husband had also attended. It sounded…well, like something out of a movie. It was awesome. I asked him if they had to wear robes and mortarboards, and he told me no, “only the prefects did.”
FANTASTIC.
There are no public schools in Britain where robes and/or mortarboards are part of the normal uniform I’m afraid - even for prefects.
You’re lucky if you get an extra stripe on your tie.
If it involves ejaculation, I’m pretty sure you owe me dinner first.
It’s not a change in language per se, but I always think of how the meaning of “marquee” varies from Britain to here. I still remember that confusing thread about the British lady who wanted a marquee at her wedding and all of the Americans were like “Why would you want a big, scrolling sign?”
Well, as it happens, you weren’t very good.
Pshaw, sir. At my school, you got a slightly thinner stripe than normal. Really quite a crappy distinction. But then, we were quite crappy prefects.
Now you’re making me wish you were a fag.
See above… I was!
Okay, really? Because I don’t THINK he was jerking me around. Do you actually know what every school in Britain does? I’m not trying to be snotty, srsly.
Oh, well, that’s all right, then.
Reminds me of when I was spending a semester in Japan and two of my good friends there were fellow smokers, from Great Britain (one Scottish, one English), and gay. “Stepping outside for a fag” jokes abounded.
No, but even Eton, Harrow, Oundle, Winchester, Shrewsbury, et al. - the hoitiest of the toity- don’t have that stuff.