Code humor and inclusiveness

Posted Jun 12, 2021 22:30 UTC (Sat) by randomguy3 (subscriber, #71063)
In reply to: Code humor and inclusiveness by pwfxq
Parent article: Code humor and inclusiveness

Going back to my example, "fag" used to be a homophobic slur in the UK but now it's just slang for cigarrette* whereas in the USA I believe it still maintains the homophobic connotations.

A word of caution in case anyone not well versed in British English takes this as gospel and attempts to employ it in practice - this is highly context dependent. Don't try to be clever about using this word in the UK. If you use it in a context where "cigarette" is a good-faith interpretation of the word, that's how people will interpret it. But the slur form is also well understood and used (either as a slur or as a reclaimed word).

Code humor and inclusiveness

Posted Jun 13, 2021 11:48 UTC (Sun) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Yeah, "now it's just slang for cigarette" implies that if you were to tell somebody they "look like a fag" you'd just be suggesting they resemble a cigarette (tall and thin maybe?) and that's not what you'll be doing at all.

Code humor and inclusiveness

Posted Jun 17, 2021 18:50 UTC (Thu) by klbrun (subscriber, #45083) [Link] (2 responses)

Since a cigarette is something you burn, could the use of fag to mean cigarette be, in fact, homophobic?

Code humor and inclusiveness

Posted Jun 17, 2021 19:09 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Practically? Possibly.

It appears the etymology's independent. Having poked around on en.wiktionary.org:

The "gay man" usage is a contraction of "faggot", which as well as meaning "bundle of sticks", "bundle of metal rods", "burning ember", and "English meatball" also came to mean "shrewish woman" and later (I dare say by extension of the "shrewish woman" sense, with some possible influence from a Yiddish term "feygele" which means "little bird", "loved one", and (offensively) "homosexual man") came to mean "homosexual and/or effeminate man".

The "cigarette" usage appears to me to be likely to be a back-construction from using "fag-end" (a very old term meaning "remnant or worst portion", etymologically distinct from the above) to refer to the unsmoked remnant of a cigarette.

Code humor and inclusiveness

Posted Jul 13, 2021 9:21 UTC (Tue) by roblucid (guest, #48964) [Link]

No, the word as used most commonly in literature before the cigarette slang, meant junior boarding school boys who had chores for seniors. All intended to be character building and young gentleman would never abuse such power, would they?
You can contort any words for cigarette to be homophobic following your argument, which disproves it by reductio ad absurdum.