doesn’t work in French. You can’t reason in English about a French word.
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Everyone is right to be offended, but let’s add some context :
For some reason, the complete text from the manager was not entirely translated, so I will add my modest translation of the end of her sentence :
“I am not going to keep [the employee]… I don’t have a good feeling about this guy. He’s a faggot, they are all constantly backstabbing people” (literally : “they are all constantly doing whore’s tricks”) Which really makes it worse because there is the homophobic insult and then a stereotypic generalization of gay men.
But, the tribunal is not a standard, generic one for civil affairs, it’s the Prud’hommes which deals primarily of issues between employees and employers. Also, the guy was not fully hired, he was on a 6 month evaluation period, where employers can fire a person very easily. Going to the Prud’hommes means the victim thought that his probation period termination was due to homophobic discrimination. And the tribunal ruled that no, his being gay was not the central reason for his firing (his not fitting with other employees is cited as more important, and they probably have brought a lot of other arguments to court to show that they had plenty reasons to fire him, and the homophobic slur was just a side effect of all the other things he did wrong according to them).
Also, they probably could have argued that he was not insulted, as the text was not destined to him and he received it by mistake. Is a insult really an insult when it’s made without your hearing it ? That’s typically a law question, I guess.
Still, their argument seems very stupid : “most hair salons employ gay men, so the gayness of this person cannot be the reason for his firing of this specific hair salon”, which is reminiscent of the “I’m not racist, I have many black friends” argument.
So all in all, yes it’s a scandal, especially if you consider the full translation, but it’s an oversimplification to summarize it as “French tribunal rules “faggot” isn’t homophobic”. It’s rather “French tribunal rules calling someone a faggot behind his back while firing him is not homophobic discrimination, if you can prove you had other reasons to fire him”
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Especially in a hair salon.
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Yeah, that’s the part I can’t figure out… You run a hair salon and you’re complaining that one of your employees seems a bit gay? WTF.
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That seems to be the exact trimmer I use for cutting my own hair/trimming my beard.
I wonder if the boss is also gay. I’m french, and most of my gay friends tends to use the word PD between them. Just wondering. This is typically a word that have different meaning depending on who use it and in what context.
[edit] just seen n0xception post, thanks a lot for all this bright clarification on the subject !
English and French seem to be outliers in that they don’t have that connection:
RE: why gay people are called faggot
Is that the reason though? It’s an interesting story, but this is what Wikipedia has to say about the etymology (the Straight Dope comes to a similar conclusion):
The American slang term is first recorded in 1914, the shortened form fag shortly after, in 1921. Its immediate origin is unclear, but it is based on the word for “bundle of sticks”, ultimately derived, via Old French, Italian and Vulgar Latin, from Latin fascis.
The word faggot has been used in English since the late 16th century as an abusive term for women, particularly old women, and reference to homosexuality may derive from this, as female terms are often used with reference to homosexual or effeminate men (cf. nancy, sissy, queen). The application of the term to old women is possibly a shortening of the term “faggot-gatherer”, applied in the 19th century to people, especially older widows, who made a meagre living by gathering and selling firewood. It may also derive from the sense of “something awkward to be carried” (compare the use of the word baggage as a pejorative term for old people in general).
An alternative possibility is that the word is connected with the practice of fagging in British private schools, in which younger boys performed (potentially sexual) duties for older boys, although the word faggot was never used in this context, only fag. There is a reference to the word faggot being used in 17th-century Britain to refer to a “man hired into military service simply to fill out the ranks at muster”, but there is no known connection with the word’s modern pejorative usage.
The Yiddish word faygele, lit. “little bird”, has been claimed by some to be related to the American usage. The similarity between the two words makes it possible that it might at least have had a reinforcing effect.
There is an urban legend, called an “oft-reprinted assertion” by Douglas Harper, that the modern slang meaning developed from the standard meaning of faggot as “bundle of sticks for burning” with regard to burning at the stake. This is unsubstantiated; the emergence of the slang term in 20th-century American English is unrelated to historical death penalties for homosexuality.
TL;DR: referring to gay people as faggots started in 20th century America, but there are a few possible roots in Europe and no verified connection to burning at the stake.
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That’s also a possible origin. And something else I’ve wondered about is whether it has any connection to “fag” being a term used in British boarding schools for younger boys who were expected to perform menial tasks for upperclassmen. That included things like making toast, although Roald Dahl said he read a lot of Dickens warming the loo seat for the older boy he was assigned to serve.
The connection to homosexuality may have come from the reputation of British boarding schools.
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That may well be true - that’s what I’d always assumed, but I haven’t found an established link. C. S. Lewis also talks about fagging, but that was more menial work and bullying - the house tarts were the ones who were associated with homosexuality.
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In that way that kids mis-use words that they’ve heard but have no idea what they mean, I’m amused to recall that around grade 2 or 3 we used the word “fagging” in the way one would use “fucking” or “humping”. Not that any of us even knew what any of those words meant to begin with.
Looks like the same “Yeah; but if the abuse is ubiquitous it couldnt’ possibly count as an abuse in any specific context” theory that we use for 4th amendment work under the ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ test.
Just to add to what n0xception said. The individual was on a short-term fixed contract (what the French call a CDD) which the employer was under no obligation to renew after six months. The person was not “fired” , but he did try to keep his job by alleging discrimination. The Court (which was concerned only with whether the employment law rules had been followed) disagreed. If he’d been on a permanent contract, and had been sacked simply because he was a homosexual then the law would have been quite different. In any event, this is an employment tribunal, its job is not to judge whether the employer suffers from a psychiatric condition which leads to a neurotic fear of homosexuals. Incidentally, PD (pédé) is a standard French term for (male) homosexuals, and has been used for a very long time.
Two other contextual points. The story appeared in Libération, affectionately known as Libé, which used to be a serious post-1968 newspaper, but is hemorrhaging readers these days and has become a bit of a joke. And the Minister who became so angry, Myriam El Khomri, is behind the notorious “reforms” designed to weaken employment protections, especially for young people, which brought 120,000 people out into the streets yesterday. Her political future is in jeopardy and she needs all the good publicity she can get. Don’t you think you should do a minimal amount of fact-checking before running stories like this?
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Faggot is used in the (brilliant) song “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues, in a different meaning.
From wikipedia : “In his Christmas podcast, musical comedian Mitch Benn commented that “faggot” was Irish and Liverpudlian slang for a lazy person, and was unrelated to the derogatory term for homosexuals”.
[edit again] dcrawford I have to say to I would like to have made an interesting and accurate post as yours
There’s faggoting in sewing and metal working. In both cases they derive their name from ye olde bundle of sticks.
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You’re okay with calling squeamish people “pussies”?
Cuz that’s pretty much all I got out of that south park episode when I watched it a few years back.
“it’s okay to call other people we don’t like the same thing we still call a historically maligned group. As long as we’re associating undesirable people with a historically oppressed group, without directly making them equivalent it’s all okay.”
What I’m getting at, is why use “fag”?
If you think you have an argument that definitively makes it acceptable to use “fag”, then it damn well better apply to “nigger”, “kike” and “spic” too.
In my Boing Boing?! Sacrebleu!
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I am not a fan of the word. Like most things, it can endearing, insulting, or simply oblivious. In the context of the article, I think it’s lame.
BUT - by complete coincidence, tonight I was looking to see if there might be any interesting new choices in the birth control / safer sex world, and happened to find this amazing ad:
It’s in bad taste, but I laughed anyway. I don’t know what they were thinking, but it made for an interesting translation.
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