Fagot (unit)
A fagot is an outdated English measure for bundles. Alternative names were fagata, faget, fagett, fagott, fagot, fagatt, bassott, ffagott and faggat .
A short fagot was a bundle of firewood 3 feet (0.91 m) long and 2 feet (0.61 m) in circumference. A long fagot was a bundle more than 3 feet long.
A fagot was also an English measure of weight (measure of weight) for a bundle of steel or iron pieces. One fagot was the equivalent of 120 pounds or 54.43 kilograms .
Going back to the colloquial meaning as "bundle (of firewood)", old women were denigrated in England from the late 16th century onwards as fagots , which was possibly a short form of fagot-gatherer ("firewood collector"). This may later be used to develop the swear word fagot (short form: fag ) for homosexual men (see also fagot ).
In the German language, the term has not established itself, but was only mentioned as a bundle of brushwood in both Zedler (Vol. 9, p. 94) and Grimm (Vol. 3, Sp. 1236) and was included in Heyse's Foreign Dictionary in 1865 .
literature
- Author collective: Meyers Konversationslexikon. Volume 5, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, p. 1014.
- Helmut Kahnt, Bernd Knorr: Old measures, coins and weights . Bibliographisches Institut, Berlin 1986, ISBN 978-3-41102-148-2 , p. 86.
- Lemma Fagot , in: Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon in 25 volumes , Volume 8, 1973, p. 446
- Lemma fagot, fagot , in: Oxford English Dictionary . 5. Dvandva - Follis , 1989, pp. 663f
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Ronald Edward Zupko: A Dictionary of Weights and Measures for the British Isles: The Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century , Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, Volume 168. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia 1985, ISBN 9780871691682 , pp. 124 f .
- ^ Fagot in The Oxford English Dictionary, accessed April 17, 2014
- ↑ Mark Steven Morton: Dirty Words: The Story of Sex Talk. London, Atlantic Books, 2005, pp. 309-323
- ^ Johann Christian August Heyse : Heyse's Foreign Dictionary , 1865, p. 341