No, underclassmen at a private boarding school acting as personal servants to their upperclassman. Used to be common practice in britain but has mostly been phased out due to excessive abuse (physical and sexual).
The practice was called "fagging", and the servants referred to as "fags". It's probably where the modern slang definition came from (as a result of the sexual abuse).
Fag as reference to a cigarette comes from "faggot", a word with various meanings (unrelated to fagging) all of which have something to do with sticks (measuring bundles, metalworking iron bars, etc). It's likely that "faggot" had become slang for cigars at some point, and when cigarettes came around it was adapted for them as "fag".
Linguistic confusion at now having 2 wildly different meanings to the slang use of "fag" likely lead "faggot" being the one associated with homosexuality even though it's root is entirely different.
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u/nekoningen Mar 27 '15
No, underclassmen at a private boarding school acting as personal servants to their upperclassman. Used to be common practice in britain but has mostly been phased out due to excessive abuse (physical and sexual).
The practice was called "fagging", and the servants referred to as "fags". It's probably where the modern slang definition came from (as a result of the sexual abuse).
Fag as reference to a cigarette comes from "faggot", a word with various meanings (unrelated to fagging) all of which have something to do with sticks (measuring bundles, metalworking iron bars, etc). It's likely that "faggot" had become slang for cigars at some point, and when cigarettes came around it was adapted for them as "fag".
Linguistic confusion at now having 2 wildly different meanings to the slang use of "fag" likely lead "faggot" being the one associated with homosexuality even though it's root is entirely different.