Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

 

FAGGOTS, FAKERY AND UP YOURS

Here I am again bothering away at the concept of truth in history. Particularly, I am concerned with the way popular discourse often asserts, without any verifiable evidence, that some things are historical facts. Often (but not always) there is a propagandistic purpose behind such assertions.

I give you three examples, working from the least to the most propagandistic.

Nowadays, if you go into many English pubs – and particularly pubs in tourist areas – you can order a “ploughman’s lunch”. The very word “ploughman” is ye olde, intended to conjure up an image of a pre-industrial world, and hence of a very old tradtion. But in 1983 there was a very good British film called The Ploughman’s Lunch, a political comment concerned, in part, with the way people can be fooled into thinking certain things are essential national values when they have, in reality, been newly coined.  The film’s title was a metaphor for this. At one point a character explains that the “traditional” ploughman’s lunch was in reality invented by an advertising agency in the 1950s, in a campaign backed by pubs and cheese manufacturers. Cheese had just come off the ration but – more urgently – as places where you could get a quick lunchtime snack, pubs were now deep in competition with new-fangled coffee bars and fast-food outlets. The marketing agency obliged by inventing the phrase “ploughman’s lunch” for the bread, cheese, pickles and beer you could get at a pub. Instant ye olde tradition. It has been objected that many pubs did serve bread, cheese pickles and beer as a snack long before the 1950s, but at no time were they ever called a “ploughman’s lunch”, nor was it ever claimed that they were an ancient tradition. And, of course, whatever they were eating  in country pubs in England before the 1950s had absolutely nothing to do with what is now served as a “Ploughman’s Lunch” [see picture below].

There is a funny coda to this, which often happens with made-up “traditions”. After all, the so-called “ploughman’s lunch” has been around for sixty-odd years now – two or three generations – so doubtless there are now people who have heard their parents and grandparents refer to the “ploughman’s lunch” as part of their youth. When that happens we refer to a phrase as traditional. But that is not how the phrase began and it is not all that ancient.

Now for my second example of made-up history. In the United States of America, and now, by American example, across much of the world, to raise one’s middle finger to somebody is to make an obscene gesture which means “f#$* you” or “up yours” or a number of other insulting things. Oddly enough, this “one finger salute” is genuinely very ancient. It is believed to be a symbolic phallus, its use as an insulting gesture has been recorded in ancient Mediterranean texts and it is now widely believed to have been brought to the USA by Italian immigrants a century ago.

However, in Britain and in other English-speaking countries (but not in the USA) there is an alternative obscene gesture, the “two-finger salute”, which similarly means “up yours” etc. This is known as “giving the fingers”, “the figs” or (apparently in Australia) “the fork”. It is given with the back of the hand facing its intended victim. As many Americans apparently do not understand, this is quite different from raising two  fingers with the palm of the hand facing an audience. To raise two fingers with the palm of the hand facing an audience is to make the “V for Victory” sign which was invented in the Second World War – and which is apparently used in the USA to signal peace.

There is a teeny bit of confusion about this, because naughty Winston Churchill knowingly made both gestures at various times – as if to say Victory to the Allies and “up yours” to the Axis, and knowing full well that hordes of English schoolboys would enjoy both gestures.

But where did this two-finger gesture come from? Long story short – NOBODY KNOWS. In the 1960s, a completely fictitious story was concocted, saying the gesture was of late medieval origin. According to this fiction, Britain’s bowmen were so successful at the Battle of Agincourt that the French king said any English soldier who was caught would have his forefinger and middle finger chopped off so that they could no longer draw back a bowstring. So the victorious English bowmen made their contemptuous two-finger salute to the French, to show that they were still whole and capable of shooting. There is no record of this story before it, an “urban legend”, was invented in the 1960s and there is certainly no reference in history books, ancient chronicles or anywhere else to a French threat to cut off bowmen’s fingers.

Yet, forsooth, I have more than once had people earbash me about the “real” origin of “the figs” before they launch into the bowmen story. This is getting close to propaganda – the English mythology which says they have always bested the French. It is one with the historical amnesia which leads the English to forget that, while they won some significant battles, it was the French who won the Hundred Years War.

And so to my third, and in some ways most contentious, example of an historical untruth used for propaganda purposes. I am aware that the insult term “faggot” – again thanks to American example – is a widespread way of demeaning homosexuals. (Older British insult words against homosexuals were “poof” or “queer” and possibly “fairy”, though “fairy” is a term that became more widespread in America). How did “faggot” come to be an insult word like this?

When I was a kid, I sometimes read the English comics Dandy (which was published from 1937 to 2012) and its stablemate Beano. In their cartoons, “faggot” was used as an insult word – but it was an insult word directed at silly or intrusive old women. It had nothing to do with homosexuals. And apparently this was how the word was used in demotic English slang – an insult word directed old women, as in “Get out of my way, you silly old faggot.” Literally, a faggot is a stick or a twig, something used for kindling fires and not worth very much. It has been surmised (but not proven) that the insult term was widely applied to old women because many were faggot-collectors; that is, very poor people who had no other livelihood than collecting windfall faggots from the woods and selling them as kindling. To call them “faggots” was the equivalent of saying “you low and worthless human being.” And this was the sense (much to the wry amusement of modern Americans) that there came to be “fags” in old English public schools. A “fag” was a younger or more junior boy who had to “fag” for older boys – fetch and carry and in effect be the older boy’s servant.  Easy to imagine older boys (boys’ schools in all ages being what they are) originally labelling them “fags” or “faggots” in the sense of worthless human beings. “Go and polish my shoes, you faggot!” – that sort of thing.

So far so good (or bad, if you prefer). So how did “faggot” come, in America, to be an insult word directed at homosexuals? The best anyone has ever been able to credibly surmise is that it was originally meant to mean low and worthless human being – the same way that the term was applied to poor old women. Perhaps it was even impying that homosexuals were like old women.

But now we again enter the world of fiction and mythology, like the fictitious explanation of Britain’s “two-finger salute”.  Within the last forty years, the fiction arose that homosexuals were called faggots because they were, in the Middle Ages, punished by being burnt (like literal faggots) at the stake. This chimed in very well with gay activist rhetoric about massive persecution against homosexuals in past ages. Let me pause here to note that I am fully aware of such persecution – a part of the authentic historical record. But being called “faggots” because they were being burnt at the stake is not history – it is a recently-concocted fiction.

I think this is a far more dangerous fiction than the other two that I have outlined here, because it is used by activists to denigrate other groups. I have heard, for example, students earnestly explaining that the word “faggot” tells us that “the Church” burnt thousands of homosexuals in the Middle Ages. (Funny, isn’t it, how many of these urban legends vaguely reference the Middle Ages?)  I have seen an editorial in an American newspaper warning people not to use “faggot” as an insult word because it refers to this (fictitious) holocaust. An American rap singer repented of his sin in once using the word, but now he has seen the light and knows the “true” story of  the word etc. etc.etc. Now I would advise people not to use “faggot” as an insult, because it is obviously demeaning. But it has absolutely nothing to do with being burnt at the stake. That is an urban legend advanced for propaganda purposes.

Again, however, we have the phenomenon of something being repeated so often that it becomes a tradition. People can already refer to (poorly-researched) books which give them the false etymology of “faggot” as an insult word. It is at this point that real historians have to put their foot down and note that there is absolutely no authentic record of “faggot” referring to victims of burning at the stake until the fiction was concocted in the late 20^th century.