h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Then: cigarette

Now: Pejoritive for homosexual

Staus: Do I really need to say it? Long gone.

The two terms are related, but in a way different than you have assumed. The British word "fag" for cigarettes is short for "faggot" and so is the perjorative term for gays "fag" that is used a great deal in America. Their common ancestor is the bundle of sticks version of "faggot" which is at least 1000 years old.

Cigarettes got the nickname because the original brown wrapped versions did indeed look like small sticks. The modern versions with filters look less like sticks. The insult for gay men is related to the burning of gays during the Crusades of the Middle Ages after forcing local youngsters to gather bundles of wood for the public spectacle.

So in fact, both the British cigarette "fag" and the American insult for gay men "fag" have drifted significantly from the original "faggot." I don't think either is etymologically superior, though the American term is arguably far more crass.

I've submitted an article on the words we use to describe gay men and other sexual minorities:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A412570

Hi, Fragilis! So nice to finally meet you. I'm an aquaintence of DD and Joanna, myself.

I agree with you. The terms used to describe people are beyond belief. I hate nasty and pejoritive lables. I was stating that "fag" was one of those words that had simply been twisted. Nothing offensive was intended by it.

I know you didn't mean any harm. I think it does us all good to understand where words come from, especially insults. We couldn't do this if we were forbidden to use the words in any context at all.

Very well put. Whenever I hear people talking about "Political correctness," (shades of 1984!) I get the creepy crawlies. I didn't know, however, the root of the word "fag." Ya learn something new every day!

Fag meaning cigarette is still current in UK. Fag meaning homosexual is recognized but never used (as far as I know).

One that is long gone is fag meaning a small boy that acted as a servant to an older boy in a British public school (i.e. a private fee-paying school). Fags had to do all sorts of demeaning tasks for the boys they served, such as warming up the toilet seat for them by sitting on it first.

As a matter of fact, the term "faggot" as applying to homosexuals dates back to the Spanish Inquisition.

The Inquisitors would burn homosexual people to death, and the name "faggot" was applied to them in a colloquial sense, implying that the homosexual men burned to death were like kindling.

As stated above, the original meaning of the word "faggot" is a bunch of sticks, i.e. kindling.

That's a neat theory, Lowmankind, but according to the dictionaries the first recorded use of "faggot" for a homosexual was in 1914. It is unlikely to be anything to do with the Spanish Inquisition, who were operating nearly 400 years earlier.

The first "recorded" use is likely to come much, much later than the first actual use. Hundreds of years wouldn't surprise me at all.

If you go back far enough, only extremely well educated (mostly very wealthy) people could afford to sit around long enough to learn to write. For that reason, the written language developed a sense of upper class propriety not shared by the spoken language of the common people.

Long after a significant minority learned to read, it remained taboo for certain types of language to be written out. Crude, insulting terms for minorities have been a prime example. It has taken the modernist and postmodernist movements of the past century to finally end all that.

This is one of those cases where etymology becomes problematic. Just because something isn't recorded doesn't mean it isn't there.

That's certainly true, Fragilis. But there are other reasons for doubting this particular etymology as well. The Spanish Inquisition did not operate in England, so it seems strange that the term faggot should be applied to homosexuals only in an English-speaking country. And if it does date from that time, why should it only have survived in America, and not in England?