fag

   Since the late eighteenth century the cry of ‘Fag!’ in a British public-school has been a summons for a junior boy to attend on a senior boy in order to carry out some duty. The word ‘fag’ here derives from the verb ‘to fag’, which means to do wearisome work, work that makes you fagged out. Robert L.Chapman, in The New Dictionary of American Slang thinks that the reputation of British public schools and the idea of a younger boy being compelled to do his senior’s bidding was enough to bring the current American slang meaning of ‘fag’ - a male homosexual - into being. If this is so, ‘fag’ was then extended to ‘faggot’, in the same sense, rather than ‘fag’ being an abbreviation of ‘faggot’ as Webster’s Dictionary suggests. In Mordecai Richler’s Cocksure ‘fag’ is equated with several other terms namely ‘pouf’, ‘homo’, ‘queer’, ‘brown-noser’, ‘lady-bird’, ‘sodomist’, though not all of these would normally mean homosexual. The Choirboys, by Joseph Wambaugh, has ‘you fag’ and ‘you insolent fucking sissy’ addressed to a man who makes homo-sexual advances to a Los Angeles policeman.