You don't have to be a faggot to love (in the non-Biblical sense) Shane MacGowan, Godfrey Fitzsimonsalmost writes.
Professors of Hiberno-English, forsooth! How gratifying it must be for Shane MacGowan to know that the words of his winning little ditty, Fairytale Of New York, especially faggot, should arouse such scholarly excitement! And now, in the spirit of the season, Hanukkah as well as Christmas, I propose to add to the gaiety of nations (no pun intended); not with Hiberno-English, but with Judaeo-German, no less.
To begin at the beginning, at least as far as my tireless pursuit of truth is concerned, let us return initially to the mid-1960s. Back then, there was current in New York a highly successful satirical revue called You Don't Have To Be Jewish. . . , which starred such Jewish thespian luminaries as Lou Jacobi, Betty Walker, Valerie Harper and Arlene Galonka.
(For those insatiable seekers after knowledge, and since none of us has anything better to do this holiday period, at this point I'll take a culturo-commercial detour and explain that title. There was in New York at that time a large Jewish family bakery called Levy's. Business wasn't as good as it might have been so, facing bankruptcy, they ran an advertising poster campaign all over the city showing a row of beaming faces from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds - African-American, Native American, Oriental, goy, Inuit etc.
And the accompanying slogan was "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's real Jewish rye". It worked: they were soon able to change the slogan to "New York is eating it up". Levy's was taken over in 1979, but the phrase "You don't have to be Jewish . . . " has entered the American vernacular. If you don't believe me, type it into Google.)
Where was I? Oh yes. In this satirical revue there was a sketch in which Lyndon B Johnson, then president, is visiting the Israeli head of state, and he says: "Greetings to you, Mr President, from me and my Lady Bird." To which the Israeli gentleman replies: "And greetings to you, Mr President, from me and my faygeleh."
On my recording of the show there is a howl of scandalised delight at this from the - presumably mainly Jewish - audience. Because, while the Yiddish faygeleh means literally "a little bird" (from the German vogel, Yiddish being essentially a dialect of German), in Yiddish slang faygeleh is also used for a homosexual.
Leo Rosten, in his The Joys Of Yiddish, writes: "Jews use faygeleh as a discreet way of describing a homosexual - especially where they might be overheard." That revue audience overhears all right, and not discreetly.
So from faygeleh, I contend - and anybody who disagrees should step outside a minute - comes the word fag, and from fag, in a process of elongation (if that's the kosher term for the opposite of abbreviation) came faggot. Nothing to do with a bundle of sticks - that's fascism.
Stuart Berg Flexner, doyen of American slangmeisters, cites literary references for fag = homosexual from as far back as the 1940s (Budd Schulberg: "He had the body of a wrestler and the face of a fag"). He also rather promiscuously links fag = homosexual to fag = cigarette = homosexual; pipe-smokers, one of which I am, and cigar-smokers being, of course, much more butch. So I reserve the right to cast doubts on his authoritativeness.
Let the philological battle commence. I stick by my Yiddish guns. In fact, I propose Shane MacGowan for the chair of Judaeo-Hiberno-German-English etymology at some prestigious university or yeshiva. It's the least he deserves. Or maybe I should just have asked Santa Claus to get me a life for Christmas.
A selection of Godfrey Fitzsimons's writings,The Times, The Places , in aid of Oxfam Ireland, is now on sale in the aid agency's shops