Faggot
This disparaging slang term for male homosexual carries overtones of effeminacy and cowardice. Because its use is widespread and its origins usually misunderstood, the word deserves careful consideration.
One of the most persistent myths that have gained a foothold in the gay movement is the belief that faggot derives from the basic meaning of "bundle of sticks used to light a fire," with the historical commentary that when witches were burned at the stake, "only presumed male homosexuals were considered low enough to help kindle the fires." An additional twist appears when the Book of Genesis in the Bible is cited to refer to homosexuals stoking the fires of hell (Sodom and Gomorrah). This story, though common, is a kind of urban legend.
The English word has in fact three forms: faggot, attested by the Oxford English Dictionary from circa 1300; fudge, attested from 1588; and faggald, which the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue first records from 1375. The first and second forms have the additional meaning "fat, slovenly woman," which according to the English Dialect Dictionary survived into the nineteenth century in the folk speech of England.
The homosexual sense of the term, originally unknown in England itself, appears for the first time in America in a vocabulary of criminal slang printed in Portland, Oregon in 1914, with the example "All the fagots (sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight." The tendency of American colloquial speech to create words of one syllable yielded the clipped form fag. The first known instance appears in a book by Nels Anderson, The Hobo (1923): "Fairies or Fags are men or boys who exploit sex for profit." The short form thus also has no connection with British fag as attested from the nineteenth century (for example, in the novel Tom Brown's Schooldays) in the sense of "public-school boy who performs menial tasks for an upperclassman."
In American slang faggot/fag usurped the semantic role of bugger in British usage, with its connotations of extreme hostility and withering contempt. In more recent decades it has become the term of abuse par excellence in the mouths of heterosexuals. It often serves simply as an insult aimed at another male's alleged want of masculinity or courage, without any specific reference to a sexual role or orientation.
The ultimate origin of the word is a Germanic term represented by the Norwegian dialect words fagg, "bundle, heap," alongside bagge, "obese, clumsy creature" (chiefly referring to animals). From the latter are derived such Romance words as French bagasse and Italian bagascia, "prostitute," whence the parallel derivative bagascione whose meaning matches that of American English faggot/fag. In Catalan bagassejar signifies to faggot, "to frequent the company of loose women."
The final proof that faggot cannot have originated in the burning of witches at the stake is that in English law both witchcraft and buggery were punishable by hanging, and that in the reign of the homosexual monarch James I the execution of heretics came to an end, so that by the time American English gave the word its new meaning there cannot have been in the popular mind even the faintest remnant of the complex of ideas credited to the term in the contemporary myth. It is purely and simply an Americanism of the twentieth century.
Given the fact that the term faggot cannot refer to burning at the stake, why does the myth continue to thrive in the gay movement? On the conscious level it serves as a device with which to attack the medieval church, by extension Christianity tout court, and finally all authority. On another level, it may linger as a “myth of origins," a kind of collective masochistic ritual in which the homosexual identifies himself as victim. This is part of the larger phenomenon of abjection, the willing assumption of humiliating and inferiorizing status. Since gay people have enough real burdens to bear, there is no point in assuming this fictional one.
The real significance of the term is different from the one fostered by the myth. The word has been used since the late sixteenth century to mean "old or unpleasant woman". Female terms are often attached to homosexual or effeminate men (cf. nancy, sissy, queen), and this seems the most likely semantic mechanism. In this way misogyny and homophobia are linked.
In British English the term fag (though not faggot) most commonly means a cigarette. A military marching song popular with the British army during World War Ifeatured the line "while there's a Lucifer [matchstick] to light your fag...". This sense comes from the original meaning of "fag-end," that is, the “last part of a piece of cloth,” which by extension became used for "the last part or portion of anything". When cigarettes were invented, this was first applied to the butt, the unsmoked part, and then came to mean the whole cigarette.
There is another meaning, unrelated to the rest, which is somewhat amusing. A traditional British usage of the word faggot, especially common in Wales and the Black Country, is a kind of pork meatball covered in gravy.
In recent years the use of fag and faggot to mean homosexual have become understood as an Americanism in British English, mainly due to their use in films and television series imported from the United States. When Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews was allegedly heard using the word in a bad-tempered informal exchange with a straight colleague in the House of Commons lobby in November 2005, he was criticized for engaging in homophobic abuse.
Because of its strong connotations of cowardice and inadequacy, the word faggot has not lent itself to the kind of reclamation that queer has attracted, though Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots may seem to gesture in this direction.
The overtones of opprobrium have not stood in the way of some popular usages, though.
For example, a fag hag designates a woman who associates with (and may prefer as non-sexual social partners) gay men, though many still regard this expression as pejorative. Young people casually employ the term as a synonym for words such as fool or jerk (i.e. "What a jerk!" becomes "What a faggot!"). Compare the recent nonsexual usage of the word gay to mean “lame, geeky, uncool.”
In 1995 the then Majority Leader of the House of Representatives Dick Armey referred to openly gay congressman Barney Frank as "Barney Fag" in a press interview. The ultraconservative pundit Ann Coulter labeled Al Gore a "total fag," remarking that Bill Clinton was a "latent homosexual." These charming observations occurred during a television interview with MSNBC host Chris Matthews (July 27, 2006).
The second album of New York punk band Mindless Self Indulgence (Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy) is entitled "Faggot."Another instance of the word's use in rock music is in the song "The Great Deceiver" by King Crimson. The line "health food faggot" opens the album Starless and Bible Black, although no gay reference is intended, as “faggot” refers to a vegetarian meatball.
Students of the historical semantics of the word owe a special debt to the late Warren Johansson. See his "The Etymology of the Word Faggot," Gay Books Bulletin, 6 (1981), 16-18, 33.
One of the most persistent myths that have gained a foothold in the gay movement is the belief that faggot derives from the basic meaning of "bundle of sticks used to light a fire," with the historical commentary that when witches were burned at the stake, "only presumed male homosexuals were considered low enough to help kindle the fires." An additional twist appears when the Book of Genesis in the Bible is cited to refer to homosexuals stoking the fires of hell (Sodom and Gomorrah). This story, though common, is a kind of urban legend.
The English word has in fact three forms: faggot, attested by the Oxford English Dictionary from circa 1300; fudge, attested from 1588; and faggald, which the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue first records from 1375. The first and second forms have the additional meaning "fat, slovenly woman," which according to the English Dialect Dictionary survived into the nineteenth century in the folk speech of England.
The homosexual sense of the term, originally unknown in England itself, appears for the first time in America in a vocabulary of criminal slang printed in Portland, Oregon in 1914, with the example "All the fagots (sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight." The tendency of American colloquial speech to create words of one syllable yielded the clipped form fag. The first known instance appears in a book by Nels Anderson, The Hobo (1923): "Fairies or Fags are men or boys who exploit sex for profit." The short form thus also has no connection with British fag as attested from the nineteenth century (for example, in the novel Tom Brown's Schooldays) in the sense of "public-school boy who performs menial tasks for an upperclassman."
In American slang faggot/fag usurped the semantic role of bugger in British usage, with its connotations of extreme hostility and withering contempt. In more recent decades it has become the term of abuse par excellence in the mouths of heterosexuals. It often serves simply as an insult aimed at another male's alleged want of masculinity or courage, without any specific reference to a sexual role or orientation.
The ultimate origin of the word is a Germanic term represented by the Norwegian dialect words fagg, "bundle, heap," alongside bagge, "obese, clumsy creature" (chiefly referring to animals). From the latter are derived such Romance words as French bagasse and Italian bagascia, "prostitute," whence the parallel derivative bagascione whose meaning matches that of American English faggot/fag. In Catalan bagassejar signifies to faggot, "to frequent the company of loose women."
The final proof that faggot cannot have originated in the burning of witches at the stake is that in English law both witchcraft and buggery were punishable by hanging, and that in the reign of the homosexual monarch James I the execution of heretics came to an end, so that by the time American English gave the word its new meaning there cannot have been in the popular mind even the faintest remnant of the complex of ideas credited to the term in the contemporary myth. It is purely and simply an Americanism of the twentieth century.
Given the fact that the term faggot cannot refer to burning at the stake, why does the myth continue to thrive in the gay movement? On the conscious level it serves as a device with which to attack the medieval church, by extension Christianity tout court, and finally all authority. On another level, it may linger as a “myth of origins," a kind of collective masochistic ritual in which the homosexual identifies himself as victim. This is part of the larger phenomenon of abjection, the willing assumption of humiliating and inferiorizing status. Since gay people have enough real burdens to bear, there is no point in assuming this fictional one.
The real significance of the term is different from the one fostered by the myth. The word has been used since the late sixteenth century to mean "old or unpleasant woman". Female terms are often attached to homosexual or effeminate men (cf. nancy, sissy, queen), and this seems the most likely semantic mechanism. In this way misogyny and homophobia are linked.
In British English the term fag (though not faggot) most commonly means a cigarette. A military marching song popular with the British army during World War Ifeatured the line "while there's a Lucifer [matchstick] to light your fag...". This sense comes from the original meaning of "fag-end," that is, the “last part of a piece of cloth,” which by extension became used for "the last part or portion of anything". When cigarettes were invented, this was first applied to the butt, the unsmoked part, and then came to mean the whole cigarette.
There is another meaning, unrelated to the rest, which is somewhat amusing. A traditional British usage of the word faggot, especially common in Wales and the Black Country, is a kind of pork meatball covered in gravy.
In recent years the use of fag and faggot to mean homosexual have become understood as an Americanism in British English, mainly due to their use in films and television series imported from the United States. When Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews was allegedly heard using the word in a bad-tempered informal exchange with a straight colleague in the House of Commons lobby in November 2005, he was criticized for engaging in homophobic abuse.
Because of its strong connotations of cowardice and inadequacy, the word faggot has not lent itself to the kind of reclamation that queer has attracted, though Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots may seem to gesture in this direction.
The overtones of opprobrium have not stood in the way of some popular usages, though.
For example, a fag hag designates a woman who associates with (and may prefer as non-sexual social partners) gay men, though many still regard this expression as pejorative. Young people casually employ the term as a synonym for words such as fool or jerk (i.e. "What a jerk!" becomes "What a faggot!"). Compare the recent nonsexual usage of the word gay to mean “lame, geeky, uncool.”
In 1995 the then Majority Leader of the House of Representatives Dick Armey referred to openly gay congressman Barney Frank as "Barney Fag" in a press interview. The ultraconservative pundit Ann Coulter labeled Al Gore a "total fag," remarking that Bill Clinton was a "latent homosexual." These charming observations occurred during a television interview with MSNBC host Chris Matthews (July 27, 2006).
The second album of New York punk band Mindless Self Indulgence (Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy) is entitled "Faggot."Another instance of the word's use in rock music is in the song "The Great Deceiver" by King Crimson. The line "health food faggot" opens the album Starless and Bible Black, although no gay reference is intended, as “faggot” refers to a vegetarian meatball.
Students of the historical semantics of the word owe a special debt to the late Warren Johansson. See his "The Etymology of the Word Faggot," Gay Books Bulletin, 6 (1981), 16-18, 33.
posted by Dyneslines at 7:54 AM
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