You scumbag You maggot you cheap lousy…

[TeaAndToast8]

My second AIBU Of the night, husbands being very argumentative! Anyway, I’ve screenshot two examples of what the Kirsty MacColl might have meant in Fairy Tale of NewYork. Who is correct.. My opinion is the description underlined in red and my husband’s is blue.

It always amuses me (not really) that they remove faggot but leave in slut.

Americans can have their faggot if we can have our fanny

Your husband is correct about the song. It is reference to a bundle of sticks so being lazy.

How does it, its short for faggot, being something you burn. You smoke and burn your fags.

Who is saying its not an insult?

Its an insult but its nothing to do with gay men, she's simply calling him useless.

Look them up Brain’s faggots. They’re on Tesco’s website too.

Here come the professionally unoffended……

My grandma used to call people "noisy faggots" if they were being loud. It definitely didn't mean homosexual when she used it. I think that use ie gay, has come from America more recently. When this song came out in the uk, nobody used the term maggot to describe a gay person.

*faggot

A good quality home made faggot, often found in country pubs is far superior to Brains.

So did mine !

Because it's a fantastic song IMO, and it's supposed to be controversial and the very opposite of a fairytale.

Yeah the use of fanny packs ( bum bags ) always amuses me on various American Facebook groups I'm on.

It's 2 people trying to wind each other up, of course they are lobbing insulting language at each other. The real language they would used would be too Anglo Saxon for radio play.

Christmas does seem to come round quicker every year

Word meanings change. Gay used to mean happy, and nothing to do with sexuality. 😉

My 1938 Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a faggot as a bundle of sticks used as fuel, which I certainly remember from fairy tales, and a dish of chopped offal.
It clearly didn’t count Irish colloquialisms, and was before the word was hi-jacked by American homophobes.

This is true. It would be bizarre to go back through old songs and change the word gay to something else.

The whole tone of FoNY is two angry people trying to hurt each other with words because they’re frustrated at life. So having a few offensive words in there is fine. When it clearly isn’t a gay slur by context. It sounds right.

Please avoid the Pogues “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash” album if you find FoNY a bit much.

Yes!!!

I wish people knew the original meaning of 'slut'. The related adjective is 'slatternly', which isn't used much now. Still misogyinistic, but let's be accurate!

"She keeps a dirty house. There's slut's wool under the beds". Over the garden fence chatter c.1950.

I remember being horrified as a kid in the 80s when Roald Dahl used the word ‘slut’ in Revolting Rhymes. 😂

My mum regularly used to call me a slut. She meant that my bedroom was a bit untidy, but I couldn't understand it because I was fourteen and didn't even have a boyfriend. She was insulting me at cross purposes.

I find the idea that it’s a “much loved Christmas song”utterly bizarre.

I’m Irish, early 50’s and my mum would regularly refer to me and younger Dsis as “ little faggots” when we played up/ got on her nerves!

I'm Irish, knew faggot was used as an offensive slur against gay men, but had no idea it was a type of meatball in the UK. We moved to the UK when the kids were little and we were on a bus one day, the girls had gone to the back without me. We stopped for a couple of minutes as the bus was ahead of schedule and they had a good chance to look around. One of them shouted, "Mum, what's a faggot?" I froze and took a second to think how I was going to explain, in front of the whole bus, what that word was and why she shouldn't use it, when she pointed to the window of a butcher's shop. I have never been so relieved in my life!