Faggots

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Minced pork offal and herbs formed into balls and eaten as a British dish ; bundles of sticks bound together for use as kindling ; a highly offensive slur aimed at gay men
2. A British meatball made from pig offal, bread and seasoning ; tied bundles of twigs or wood used to light fires ; a derogatory insult directed at homosexual men
3. Savoury balls of minced offal served in gravy in Britain ; sticks gathered and bound together as firewood ; a deeply insulting term for a gay man

Etymology: Bundles of sticks, not bundles of people, come first here. The Old French "fagot" meant a bundle of sticks, and English borrowed it in Middle English as "fagot" with that same firewood sense. Its ultimate source is uncertain, though one proposal links it to a diminutive of Vulgar Latin "facus", which in turn derives from the Ancient Greek "phákelos", meaning bundle of wood. The sense of a person is the one most readers will recognise, and it is the one that shows how a word for a bundle can become a word for a people. The sense relating to persons may have grown out of the bundle sense, much as "baggage" was used for people, but it was probably reinforced by "fag", from fagging, and by a Yiddish word, "feygele", meaning "little bird" and used for a homosexual man. That Yiddish word is related to English "fowl". Because the offensive sense has developed from several sources at once, it is hard to trace in a single line.

Synonyms: bundle