Shawn Farash, Trump's great impersonator, called him the outlaw president. I think that's perfect. Trump should say, "I'm your outlaw president" as often as possible. It brings to mind Clint Eastwood's movie, "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and rubs their noses in it, big time. It'd be one more time Trump has turned a perceived negative into a massive positive. From CFP, "I'm coming and I'm bringing 100 million outlaws with me." That is the best possible campaign slogan for Trump. it speaks volumes in a single sentence. Needs to be a T-shirt and a bumper sticker right now.
1 billion for ‘the religion of peace’ have already declared for the 7th century. Convert or lose your head…unless the CCP gets here first. Same result but prayer rugs not necessary.
i am surround by leftists in my neighborhood here in fenton,mi. they're ok but still....! i like the town but michiganitstan is getting difficult to endure.
i'm trying to muster up the intestinal fortitude to make one last move...to florida. alone (now 76). assets is not the issue.
it's no small thing to move 1200 miles at my age. i've lived in flordia before and am well acquainted with the state.
we all have warts, but are mostly able to keep them in the closet. trump has to be an open book because he is maga. it's not a fair system but life is rarely fair. freedom isn't free for most of us.
I see a lot of Texas plates here in NC. Don’t know if they are native Texans who are here on vacation, relocating or transplants from Texas via California, Oregon or Washington state. My daughter lived there for a few years. It gets hot, really hot, & damned hot! Great place & people & the best BBQ in the country, the Salt Lick in Driftwood.
Florida has become VERY expensive. Hazard insurance is causing long term resident to pack up and move. We left New Hampshire and applied the brakes in Northern Georgia.
Rent is $1100-1500 for an 800 Ft apt and they are building them by the tons... Have no idea who is renting them. There are no jobs no matter what that jobs reports says decent pay or otherwise, and places are closing. Yeah, utilities not included. I had to have a housemate in 95 for a $500 mortgage.
Try central Florida. I moved to Mt Dora 3 years ago and love it! Hurricane Ian didn’t touch us. I am a senior citizen too and it was my worst move but very worth it.
I grew up in Upstate NY and have lived in eight states, but have lived in East TN for the last 35 years and highly recommend it for low taxes/cost of living and high quality of life. It's also very beautiful year round. Middle TN is nice too.
Folly Beach is full of leftwing kooks. Lots of drugs. I live a few miles away and the people there like to advertise that they are “bohemian” which seems to translate as “old hippies”. It’s definitely NOT MAGA country.
Folly beach is hours from western SC - Greenville, Spartanburg area is entirely different. Close to NC but only average air transport if that matters. Good other transportation and lots of outdoors life. Knoxville / Marysville TN also outdoors and full small city life. Like many old river cities, Knoxville has a lot of great views up and down river. It also has 3 and sometimes 4 seasons, which is appealing. If there was any tech hiring we might haven ended there on leaving CA. Chattanooga also pleasant - limited air transport tho. No death tax.
Folly does have great surf and beach life. Little else. Golf is elsewhere. Better surf than Kiawah, which is other side of Charleston and a little longer drive into town. We worship at St Michaels and feel very at home there. Locals tire of tourists and rising prices, as most resort areas do, Charleston really suffered from lockdown BLM riots. It’s a really old city and very southern and we are comfortable there as visitors - it’s very HOT a lot longer than it’s very COLD in NH. (Only 10 weeks give or take that are very cold here vs 6-8 months of really hot in SC and south.)
Item 3: You said there was no pier review of the Gaza landing site. And now they are pier-less. But in reality, the corps of engineers is responsible for building structures to modify the battlefield during war... they are the tip of the pier. It was their responsibility to get things right. Now we are a laughingstock in that har-har-bor.
I would love to think the sleeping giant has been awakened. I know my Vietnamese friend cried yesterday. She escaped after the war. She knows suppression.
not unless a million strong can figure out how to stop the stealing cheating and lying about the stealing and cheating of elections...not to mention the hundred million or so who actually 'believe' that bovine scatology.
#8 A Trillion Dollars spent to deport the illegals would be wonderful. A Trillion Dollars is easily available from cuts to sending money to Iran, terrorist organizations, DEI programs, Dept of Miseducation, Dept. of Energy, CDC, WHO, the UN, and outlawing earmarks. Yes, I do understand I have exceeded the necessary cuts to fund the deportation effort. Enforcing rules against hiring illegals would go a long way in encouraging self-deportation. *** A recent spending bill heralded by the GOP as a victory was passed with $45 Billion Dollars of earmarks attached. That fact was not part of the GOP press releases. Ban earmarks. Save the budget. *** #16. Don't you love the Democrat's war on language? We used to have terms like rape, assault and battery, fondling, offensive language, off-color jokes, leering, embarrassment and insult. Now we have something called sexual assault that covers all of those and more. Don't forget to be outraged whenever you hear of a man being accused of sexual assault. Maybe. Just maybe he will be guilty of some really bad thing a la Trump. *** #18. Poor Yale. A once decent educational institution with a beautiful campus and deserved prestige has been reduced to nothing but a beautiful campus maintained by DEI hires. *** #21. Every medical "professional" involved in the butchery called gender-affirming care is a graduate of the Josef Mengele School of Medicine. Every American alive in the 1940's knew exactly what to do with such people. Most modern day Americans retain those ancestral beliefs but they are not running the health care establishments. *** #29. Hold on a second, Buster. Where New York goes, California must lead. Out. Out damned States! *** #31. Joe Manchin is a joke looking for a forum to park its tent. *** PS. Facebook places a false information label on every post I receive from Hillsdale College. The label means the post is hidden from view. It takes three steps to discover their "fact checkers" have declared a single word "false." For that "offense." Hillsdale must be deprived of its right to share opinions and facts with others.
Cool poll. I hazily remember Michael Jordan saying that he only competed with himself. If true, that explains his pinnacle of excellence. They that compete or compare themselves with others are not wise. Bible reference. You, Don, are exceeding your own high standards repeatedly.
looks like they are all well remembered. that indicates a good poll surber.
my pick was summer in the city. that came out in 1966, the year i graduated from high school. flint northwestern. second graduation class. my sister was in the first class. we had 739 in our 12th grade alone. over 2400 in the 3 grades. the school has been closed for 6 years now. d.o.a.
i was an early hippy. took a 3 year pause for the army (68-70) then went right back to being a long haired hippy again in the 70's. we all have a story subvet.
I'm so old, I remember when Louis Farrakhan was considered "out there" and too extreme. Nowadays, his words are everyday marxist-dem talking points and deeds.
It shouldn't be a surprise that dems always had a soft spot for the Castro's, Brezhnev's, Mao's and islamists of the world. Let's call the kkk party what the truly are these days; marxists, straight up.
Final comment?? I'm grateful to George Soros for pointing out a winning strategy to us by using all the conservative DA's in the future to chase down the dumbasses across the nation with the law. I'm also grateful to Alvin Bragg for converting never trumpers into Trump supporters I was pleasantly shocked when Snow from Maine wrote a clear treatise on the stupid injustice being conducted against Trump.
The omitted answer is 'a fag.' That's from 'Faggot': defined as a bundle of sticks or twigs bound together as fuel. seems straight-forward to me. why all the fuss?
A STAFF REPORT FROM THE STRAIGHT DOPE SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD
By Straight Dope Staff Jul 29, 2003, 2:00am EDT
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Dear Straight Dope: I recently reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy and I’ve always been curious about Tolkien’s casual use of the term faggot. I guess that in Britain the term does not carry a negative connotation and is used as slang for cigarettes and whatnot, but it still gets me thinking. How can a word go from meaning “a bundle of sticks” to “homosexual male”? I’ve looked elsewhere on the Internet, but I haven’t been able to find any unbiased resources or even biased ones that state their sources. They all say that it goes back to heretics being forced to carry the faggots for their own execution at the stake. Forgive me for being skeptical, but this sounds a heckuva lot like the story about the origin of the term “rule of thumb,” albeit backward. Josh G.
samclem replies:
Well, Josh, you’re right to think that the British historically haven’t found “faggot” offensive–with the exception of a vile-tasting meatball currently marketed in the UK as Mr. Brain’s Faggots. One of the advertising lines says, “It’s no wonder 100 million faggots are eaten in the UK every year!” As Dave Barry says, “I’m NOT making this up.”
It took Americans to apply the term to male homosexuals. First some history.
The term faggot or fagot, meaning bundle of sticks, shows up around 1300 in English. It almost certainly came from Old French, possibly going back to Greek phakelos. Since those bundles of sticks were mainly used for fires, it’s not surprising that the term came to mean burning sticks. Then there was that nasty business in medieval times where heretics were burned at the stake. Some later cites indicate heretics who repented and were spared a fiery death had to wear a picture of a faggot on their sleeve to show what might have been their fate. But no print evidence exists that homosexuals were referred to as faggots before the twentieth century, with the origin definitely in the U.S., not Britain.
The British continued to use the words fag and faggot as nouns, verbs and adjectives right through the early 20th century, never applying it to homosexuals at any time. To fag or to be a fag was a common term in British schools from the late 1700s and referred to a lower classman who performed chores for upperclassmen. While this term was also in vogue at Harvard in the first half of the 19th century, it died out by the mid-1800s in the U.S., leaving it in use only in England. Nineteenth century Britons also heard “faggot” used in reference to an ill-tempered woman, i.e., a ball-buster, a battleaxe, a shrew. That meaning of the term continued into the early 20th century, and the usage was gradually applied to children as well as women. The relationship, if any, between faggot-as-bundle-of-sticks and faggot-as-shrewish-woman is unknown.
The first known published use of the word faggot or fag to refer to a male homosexual appeared in 1914 in the U.S. It referred to a homosexual ball where the men were dressed in drag and called them “fagots (sissies).” Ernest Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises (1926), included the line, “You’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot.” A 1921 cite says, “Androgynes [are] known as ‘fairies,’ ‘fags,’ or ‘brownies.’”
George Chauncey, in his excellent 1994 work Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, says that the terms fairy, faggot, and queen were used by homosexuals to refer to men who were ostentatiously effeminate. Homosexuals who were not as showy referred to themselves as “queer” in the first decades of the 20th century. But the general public mainly called homosexuals “fairies.” If you were in London in the 1920s through the 1940s and used the term “fag,” the man in the street might have offered you a cigarette, and quite possibly that would have been the case with many Americans at the time.
All of this does little to answer your original question: How did a bundle of sticks come to mean a homosexual male? Most likely it didn’t. Here we’ll have to go to theory. Since I’m writing this, mine will have to do.
We notice with some words a progression of usage that morphs along the lines of “woman/girl” > “woman/girl/child” > “effeminate male” > “homosexual male.” The word fairy is a good example. “Faggot” in the sense of an ill-tempered woman is another. I independently came to that conclusion while answering a general question on the SDMB. But, in a post to the American Dialect Society mailing list, Dr. Laurence Horn, professor of linguistics at Yale University, posted the progression that I just used (he did it much more succinctly than I could). Still unexplained is how a Britishism jumped the ocean in a short period of time to acquire a new meaning in the U.S. Perhaps it was an independent formation. Words happen.
As a last thought, a current notion holds that the Yiddish word faygeleh, “little bird,” might have been the source, but lacks evidence other than the claim that the word was commonly used in Yiddish prior to WWII to indicate a homosexual. With the digitizing of publications allowing searching never before possible, perhaps some further scholarship will be forthcoming to help solve the mystery.
Resources: Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, edited by J. E. Lighter, New York, 1994-1997.
STAFF REPORTS ARE WRITTEN BY THE STRAIGHT DOPE SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD, CECIL’S ONLINE AUXILIARY. THOUGH THE SDSAB DOES ITS BEST, THESE COLUMNS ARE EDITED BY ED ZOTTI, NOT CECIL, SO ACCURACYWISE YOU’D BETTER KEEP YOUR FINGERS CROSSED.
Item 19: I used to play bridge with Richard Dreyfuss' father Norman. Norman was so down and out, that he wore sweat pants every day. Meanwhile, his kid was on top of the world having starred in Jaws. Richard not only abandoned his father, but changed his name by adding a second s at the end. His dad's name was Dreyfus; Richard was born Richard Stephen Dreyfus. I note all this to say Richard was a prick, even back then.
Shawn Farash, Trump's great impersonator, called him the outlaw president. I think that's perfect. Trump should say, "I'm your outlaw president" as often as possible. It brings to mind Clint Eastwood's movie, "The Outlaw Josey Wales" and rubs their noses in it, big time. It'd be one more time Trump has turned a perceived negative into a massive positive. From CFP, "I'm coming and I'm bringing 100 million outlaws with me." That is the best possible campaign slogan for Trump. it speaks volumes in a single sentence. Needs to be a T-shirt and a bumper sticker right now.
Yesterday Dan Bongino put a message on Truth Social saying, “I’m voting for the outlaw”. I’d put that on my car bumper in a heartbeat.
git er done cowboy. make a hat for that too.
"The Outlaw Donald Trump" Maybe a cowboy hat this time...
To borrow from an old Louisiana campaign, "Vote for the felon. It's important!"
“Make America Outlaw Again”. We already did it once, back in the 18th century.
The laws of men are made by men to serve men but some serve a higher law and only bend the knee for the Lord Jesus Christ. May it be so.
Yes…may it be so.
1 billion for ‘the religion of peace’ have already declared for the 7th century. Convert or lose your head…unless the CCP gets here first. Same result but prayer rugs not necessary.
Well, that’s good. I have bad knees.
"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees"
Emiliano Zapata
just a hat tip to Dan Bongino who proposed the Outlaw moniker
"Get X coffins ready..."
https://youtu.be/Sv_GcxkmW4Y?si=qxXn7A-xlgsXIKkW
I'll bet these kind of ideas are pouring into the campaing. MAGA Outlaw baby!
Amen
A winning bumper sticker but too many words. Tees it is.
Don, you are absolutely ON FIRE today with the references. I am left speechless. Winsome Earle-Sears for VP.
Winsome for Virginia Governor !
Not native born. She's Jamaican.
That didn’t seem to slow the Democrats down in 2008. (Puts on tin foil Conspiracy Theory hat.)
You only have to be right once to prove the value of paranoia.
I know. I thought of that when as I was posting that comment.
Sevenfold Amen. Queue the choir.
i am surround by leftists in my neighborhood here in fenton,mi. they're ok but still....! i like the town but michiganitstan is getting difficult to endure.
i'm trying to muster up the intestinal fortitude to make one last move...to florida. alone (now 76). assets is not the issue.
it's no small thing to move 1200 miles at my age. i've lived in flordia before and am well acquainted with the state.
we all have warts, but are mostly able to keep them in the closet. trump has to be an open book because he is maga. it's not a fair system but life is rarely fair. freedom isn't free for most of us.
i stand with trump...warts and all.
Check out Texas. We've got room for ya
“That’s right, you’re not from Texas, but Texas wants you anyway.”
I see a lot of Texas plates here in NC. Don’t know if they are native Texans who are here on vacation, relocating or transplants from Texas via California, Oregon or Washington state. My daughter lived there for a few years. It gets hot, really hot, & damned hot! Great place & people & the best BBQ in the country, the Salt Lick in Driftwood.
Don Walser, Rolling Stone From Texas, always on my playlist.
https://youtu.be/d_yhjE61A7c?si=l7DOKCZ5ooxEhj8p
Florida has become VERY expensive. Hazard insurance is causing long term resident to pack up and move. We left New Hampshire and applied the brakes in Northern Georgia.
see that lot rent is now $1050 in clearwater. holy inflation batman.
Rent is $1100-1500 for an 800 Ft apt and they are building them by the tons... Have no idea who is renting them. There are no jobs no matter what that jobs reports says decent pay or otherwise, and places are closing. Yeah, utilities not included. I had to have a housemate in 95 for a $500 mortgage.
Come on down! You’ll be very welcome here;-)
just give me a general area as a recommendation and that would be appreciated. if you don't want to say, i get it.
Northeast. Jacksonville, Fernandina , Amelia Island area.
i built a house on dr's inlet (fleming island) just east of 17 and 220. at that time (1988) it was in the woods. amazing area.
Better seafood on the gulf coast...
yup. naples has great food.
Emerald Coast in the northwest panhandle. I’ve lived in Jacksonville and it’s gone blue in recent years. The traffic is a nightmare, too.
i have a very good friend who says the same thing about the emerald coast. he has a time share there.
Bonita Springs on the West Coast, just above Naples.
Try central Florida. I moved to Mt Dora 3 years ago and love it! Hurricane Ian didn’t touch us. I am a senior citizen too and it was my worst move but very worth it.
i have friends who live in mt. dora and rave about it. seriously. they keep telling me to move there and that i'll never miss michiganistan.
A vote for Sarasota. True paradise here, but no longer a secret
Rent in a QUALITY condo on the west coast, e.g. Tampa. Or go to a quality assisted living.
id i could afford it, i would move to long boat key.
Tennessee or western SC if we leave NH.
I grew up in Upstate NY and have lived in eight states, but have lived in East TN for the last 35 years and highly recommend it for low taxes/cost of living and high quality of life. It's also very beautiful year round. Middle TN is nice too.
folly beach is awesome but pricey.
Folly Beach is full of leftwing kooks. Lots of drugs. I live a few miles away and the people there like to advertise that they are “bohemian” which seems to translate as “old hippies”. It’s definitely NOT MAGA country.
yup. great place to visit though. i have a good friend who lives there. multi-millionaire who comes and goes as he pleases.
Folly beach is hours from western SC - Greenville, Spartanburg area is entirely different. Close to NC but only average air transport if that matters. Good other transportation and lots of outdoors life. Knoxville / Marysville TN also outdoors and full small city life. Like many old river cities, Knoxville has a lot of great views up and down river. It also has 3 and sometimes 4 seasons, which is appealing. If there was any tech hiring we might haven ended there on leaving CA. Chattanooga also pleasant - limited air transport tho. No death tax.
Folly does have great surf and beach life. Little else. Golf is elsewhere. Better surf than Kiawah, which is other side of Charleston and a little longer drive into town. We worship at St Michaels and feel very at home there. Locals tire of tourists and rising prices, as most resort areas do, Charleston really suffered from lockdown BLM riots. It’s a really old city and very southern and we are comfortable there as visitors - it’s very HOT a lot longer than it’s very COLD in NH. (Only 10 weeks give or take that are very cold here vs 6-8 months of really hot in SC and south.)
Arizona is the place you ought to be.
going left.
too close to the border.
too many women in charge.
no beaches.
too close to kaliforniastan
I can't handle humidity and mosquitoes.
Rather live in hell.
Item 3: You said there was no pier review of the Gaza landing site. And now they are pier-less. But in reality, the corps of engineers is responsible for building structures to modify the battlefield during war... they are the tip of the pier. It was their responsibility to get things right. Now we are a laughingstock in that har-har-bor.
The pier is a perfect example of how our government does things.
They take something that's meant to be temporary and try to make it permanent and it falls apart. Then they do it again.
So true !
Are you related to Don? LOL
Distant cousins. According to 23 and me they have a common relative back several generations named Noah, a boat builder and amateur wine maker.
Don's side of the family got the Bentley genes, but we're all stuck with the genetic defect that produces puns.
I think we won.
It could also be that a few true patriots in their midst “accidentally on purpose” missed a few vital screws or bolts here and there. Oops! It broke!
😏 heh.
You'd have to have a screw loose to do that; they might dock your pay if they found out.
Like they’d give a shit. Pardon my French.
I was more aiming for the puns than the truth...
Oh my bad - a little slow today. 😞
And a fine job you did D.T.
I would love to think the sleeping giant has been awakened. I know my Vietnamese friend cried yesterday. She escaped after the war. She knows suppression.
I would, too. I wonder if it'll be true this time.
not unless a million strong can figure out how to stop the stealing cheating and lying about the stealing and cheating of elections...not to mention the hundred million or so who actually 'believe' that bovine scatology.
Item 32
Joy Behar admits to pissing herself when she heard the verdict.
The woman has no shame.
Nor brain
nor common sense.
Nor feminine qualities.
for certain. alpha females like her are destroying the world.
And so little joy that no sane person wants to be her.
And yet, her name is Joy. Hmm…
Her and Biden have that in common
#8 A Trillion Dollars spent to deport the illegals would be wonderful. A Trillion Dollars is easily available from cuts to sending money to Iran, terrorist organizations, DEI programs, Dept of Miseducation, Dept. of Energy, CDC, WHO, the UN, and outlawing earmarks. Yes, I do understand I have exceeded the necessary cuts to fund the deportation effort. Enforcing rules against hiring illegals would go a long way in encouraging self-deportation. *** A recent spending bill heralded by the GOP as a victory was passed with $45 Billion Dollars of earmarks attached. That fact was not part of the GOP press releases. Ban earmarks. Save the budget. *** #16. Don't you love the Democrat's war on language? We used to have terms like rape, assault and battery, fondling, offensive language, off-color jokes, leering, embarrassment and insult. Now we have something called sexual assault that covers all of those and more. Don't forget to be outraged whenever you hear of a man being accused of sexual assault. Maybe. Just maybe he will be guilty of some really bad thing a la Trump. *** #18. Poor Yale. A once decent educational institution with a beautiful campus and deserved prestige has been reduced to nothing but a beautiful campus maintained by DEI hires. *** #21. Every medical "professional" involved in the butchery called gender-affirming care is a graduate of the Josef Mengele School of Medicine. Every American alive in the 1940's knew exactly what to do with such people. Most modern day Americans retain those ancestral beliefs but they are not running the health care establishments. *** #29. Hold on a second, Buster. Where New York goes, California must lead. Out. Out damned States! *** #31. Joe Manchin is a joke looking for a forum to park its tent. *** PS. Facebook places a false information label on every post I receive from Hillsdale College. The label means the post is hidden from view. It takes three steps to discover their "fact checkers" have declared a single word "false." For that "offense." Hillsdale must be deprived of its right to share opinions and facts with others.
Hillsdale should be in charge of reconstituting the education curriculum when the Dept. of Ed. is eradicated from the face of the earth.
Great suggestion!
What is this Facebook you speak of?
Cool poll. I hazily remember Michael Jordan saying that he only competed with himself. If true, that explains his pinnacle of excellence. They that compete or compare themselves with others are not wise. Bible reference. You, Don, are exceeding your own high standards repeatedly.
Thanks
Now if only I can get a Hanes endorsement commercial or two
There's a visual one could do without...😳
Glad I had no beverage in hand this morning, even though I need coooofffeeee
Don could be the top banana in a throwback Fruit of the Loom commercial.
Not touching THAT one ...
This conversation made me roar with laughter. Thank you friends, although regrettably this does nothing to prepare me for getting out in public.
looks like they are all well remembered. that indicates a good poll surber.
my pick was summer in the city. that came out in 1966, the year i graduated from high school. flint northwestern. second graduation class. my sister was in the first class. we had 739 in our 12th grade alone. over 2400 in the 3 grades. the school has been closed for 6 years now. d.o.a.
John B. Sebastion "Lovin' Spoonful"
i was an early hippy. took a 3 year pause for the army (68-70) then went right back to being a long haired hippy again in the 70's. we all have a story subvet.
I cut my shoulder length hair before I went in to the Navy. “I coulda tripped out easy but I changed my ways”
my son was in the navy for four years. uss kearsarge amphibious ship. bosnia.
I served with Bushnell on the "Turtle"
I was serving when G_d took the Sun critical.
My class was 100. Nice size!
indeed.
I'm so old, I remember when Louis Farrakhan was considered "out there" and too extreme. Nowadays, his words are everyday marxist-dem talking points and deeds.
It shouldn't be a surprise that dems always had a soft spot for the Castro's, Brezhnev's, Mao's and islamists of the world. Let's call the kkk party what the truly are these days; marxists, straight up.
I remember Rush referring to “Calypso Louie.” Boy do I miss Rush😢
Mega Dittos!
Item 26: Hard for Democrats to whip off “the hood” as they are the party of the KKK.
Final comment?? I'm grateful to George Soros for pointing out a winning strategy to us by using all the conservative DA's in the future to chase down the dumbasses across the nation with the law. I'm also grateful to Alvin Bragg for converting never trumpers into Trump supporters I was pleasantly shocked when Snow from Maine wrote a clear treatise on the stupid injustice being conducted against Trump.
Talk is cheap.
It is. But the 50 million in donations gives me hope
And so is Snow.
Thanks for the Winsome Sears tweet—I’m a fan. And the Cousin Eddie reference—so true!
The omitted answer is 'a fag.' That's from 'Faggot': defined as a bundle of sticks or twigs bound together as fuel. seems straight-forward to me. why all the fuss?
Exactly! WTF? (Why The Face?)
How did it come to be applied to queers ?
Here is what I found...
How did “f-ggot” get to mean “male homosexual”?
A STAFF REPORT FROM THE STRAIGHT DOPE SCIENCE ADVISORY BOARD
By Straight Dope Staff Jul 29, 2003, 2:00am EDT
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Dear Straight Dope: I recently reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy and I’ve always been curious about Tolkien’s casual use of the term faggot. I guess that in Britain the term does not carry a negative connotation and is used as slang for cigarettes and whatnot, but it still gets me thinking. How can a word go from meaning “a bundle of sticks” to “homosexual male”? I’ve looked elsewhere on the Internet, but I haven’t been able to find any unbiased resources or even biased ones that state their sources. They all say that it goes back to heretics being forced to carry the faggots for their own execution at the stake. Forgive me for being skeptical, but this sounds a heckuva lot like the story about the origin of the term “rule of thumb,” albeit backward. Josh G.
samclem replies:
Well, Josh, you’re right to think that the British historically haven’t found “faggot” offensive–with the exception of a vile-tasting meatball currently marketed in the UK as Mr. Brain’s Faggots. One of the advertising lines says, “It’s no wonder 100 million faggots are eaten in the UK every year!” As Dave Barry says, “I’m NOT making this up.”
It took Americans to apply the term to male homosexuals. First some history.
The term faggot or fagot, meaning bundle of sticks, shows up around 1300 in English. It almost certainly came from Old French, possibly going back to Greek phakelos. Since those bundles of sticks were mainly used for fires, it’s not surprising that the term came to mean burning sticks. Then there was that nasty business in medieval times where heretics were burned at the stake. Some later cites indicate heretics who repented and were spared a fiery death had to wear a picture of a faggot on their sleeve to show what might have been their fate. But no print evidence exists that homosexuals were referred to as faggots before the twentieth century, with the origin definitely in the U.S., not Britain.
The British continued to use the words fag and faggot as nouns, verbs and adjectives right through the early 20th century, never applying it to homosexuals at any time. To fag or to be a fag was a common term in British schools from the late 1700s and referred to a lower classman who performed chores for upperclassmen. While this term was also in vogue at Harvard in the first half of the 19th century, it died out by the mid-1800s in the U.S., leaving it in use only in England. Nineteenth century Britons also heard “faggot” used in reference to an ill-tempered woman, i.e., a ball-buster, a battleaxe, a shrew. That meaning of the term continued into the early 20th century, and the usage was gradually applied to children as well as women. The relationship, if any, between faggot-as-bundle-of-sticks and faggot-as-shrewish-woman is unknown.
The first known published use of the word faggot or fag to refer to a male homosexual appeared in 1914 in the U.S. It referred to a homosexual ball where the men were dressed in drag and called them “fagots (sissies).” Ernest Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises (1926), included the line, “You’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot.” A 1921 cite says, “Androgynes [are] known as ‘fairies,’ ‘fags,’ or ‘brownies.’”
George Chauncey, in his excellent 1994 work Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, says that the terms fairy, faggot, and queen were used by homosexuals to refer to men who were ostentatiously effeminate. Homosexuals who were not as showy referred to themselves as “queer” in the first decades of the 20th century. But the general public mainly called homosexuals “fairies.” If you were in London in the 1920s through the 1940s and used the term “fag,” the man in the street might have offered you a cigarette, and quite possibly that would have been the case with many Americans at the time.
All of this does little to answer your original question: How did a bundle of sticks come to mean a homosexual male? Most likely it didn’t. Here we’ll have to go to theory. Since I’m writing this, mine will have to do.
We notice with some words a progression of usage that morphs along the lines of “woman/girl” > “woman/girl/child” > “effeminate male” > “homosexual male.” The word fairy is a good example. “Faggot” in the sense of an ill-tempered woman is another. I independently came to that conclusion while answering a general question on the SDMB. But, in a post to the American Dialect Society mailing list, Dr. Laurence Horn, professor of linguistics at Yale University, posted the progression that I just used (he did it much more succinctly than I could). Still unexplained is how a Britishism jumped the ocean in a short period of time to acquire a new meaning in the U.S. Perhaps it was an independent formation. Words happen.
As a last thought, a current notion holds that the Yiddish word faygeleh, “little bird,” might have been the source, but lacks evidence other than the claim that the word was commonly used in Yiddish prior to WWII to indicate a homosexual. With the digitizing of publications allowing searching never before possible, perhaps some further scholarship will be forthcoming to help solve the mystery.
Resources: Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, edited by J. E. Lighter, New York, 1994-1997.
samclem
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Item 19: I used to play bridge with Richard Dreyfuss' father Norman. Norman was so down and out, that he wore sweat pants every day. Meanwhile, his kid was on top of the world having starred in Jaws. Richard not only abandoned his father, but changed his name by adding a second s at the end. His dad's name was Dreyfus; Richard was born Richard Stephen Dreyfus. I note all this to say Richard was a prick, even back then.
On the road so pressed for time and essentials only.
Loads of gems today in this piece as usual. Many polished a few rough and uncut.
Optional poll choice ... Summertime Blues by Blue Cheer.
'There ain't no cure ...'
Eddie Cochran
Subvet, I looked up Eddie Cochran and now see the connection. Thanks for enlightenment and the history lesson. WS
Eddie did it best but Alan Jackson isn't far behind Sub.