ASPartOfMe wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
If any of you Brits find yourself here strolling the streets of the USA, and you suddenly get an urge for a cigarette don't EVER ask the locals "where can I find a fag?".
“Fag” or “fa***t” is roughly the homophobe equivalent to “n****r” in America.
Exactly.
In England fag/fa***t means a "cigarette".
Originally a "fa***t" was the bundle you made of the sticks you gathered for kindling to start your fire.
Its easy to see how that evolved into meaning cigarette since cigarettes are burning sticks.
How the American usage to mean "a homosexual male" originated is not so obvious to me.
But in the 19th Century private all male schools in England younger boys worked as servants for older boys. And the servants were called "fags". So you have an all male school, horny teen guys, and no girls around to date, and some kids have power over other kids to force them to do stuff, and if you let your imagination go you can imagine how that usage of the word "fag" could have evolved. Or that was my theory once. But the trouble with my theory is that that was in England (where they don't use the word for homosexual), and not in the US (where we do use it to mean that). So its still a mystery.