Thursday, April 15, 2010

The Early Years of Gay, Queer, and Faggot

Just everybody knows what the words gay, queer, and faggot mean these days.

Well, in the early years of their origin, they had a wholly different meaning.
Gay actually meant happily excited; queer simply meant odd, or eccentric; and faggot meant a bundle of sticks, a knitting technique, or a kind of meatball.
Sometimes they're still used like that in literature, but hardly.

It's interesting how paragraphs like these would be seen nowadays.

The lady stopped faggoting her piece of cloth and offered him some faggots.
"I apologize for the food," she said. "My husband is a hunter. This is the only thing I can offer."
Flambeau kindly refused. "What do you do anyway?" he asked.
She looked at him and said with a warm smile, "I gather faggots in the woods and sell them."
She then fell into silence as she continued knitting.
Flambeau watched her work closely. It wasn't done yet, but it had already shown its beauty. He found himself amazed. Everything in his sight was so queer, that he became gay.

1 comment:

  1. Hahaha....yes, I've read some literary sophisticated English novels and they use the word "gay" as how it suppose to be.."The Case of Exploding Mango" is one of the example hehe..

    Perhaps you could trace the history how gay could turn from "happily excited" to "Male homosexual"..that would be interesting..hehe

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