First missiles on roofs now fake fag terror alerts!

[Rum]

From the Beeb: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-st ... e-18728303

Fake cigarette caused M6 police Megabus coach swoop

A fake cigarette prompted armed police to swoop on a coach on the M6 Toll road and close the motorway for four hours.

Forty eight passengers on the Megabus Preston to London service were led off the coach and forced to sit apart in a cordon on the opposite carriageway.

The road was closed between junctions T3 and T4 near Lichfield before police said they were no longer treating the incident as suspicious.

Police said they received a "genuine report" of vapour escaping from a bag.

A force spokeswoman said, given the credibility of the information received, officers "responded swiftly and proportionately".
The Megabus coach being driven off the M6 Toll road accompanied by police A passenger on the bus said they had seen "vapour"

The M6 Toll road was shut from about 08:20 BST and fully reopened by 14:00 BST northbound and by 15:00 BST southbound.

Staffordshire Police received a report from someone who saw vapour as the coach was near the M6 Toll plaza at Weeford, near Lichfield.

The force said on investigation they found the passenger had an electronic cigarette which produces a visible vapour.

The passengers, including at least one young boy, were taken to a cordoned-off area of the motorway and surrounded by police.

Officers searched the coach passengers one by one.

Several other cordoned-off areas could also be seen, along with what appeared to be decontamination units.

“Start Quote

The worst part was being stuck on the bus not knowing what was going on”

Jenny Lister Passenger

Military personnel, police dog handlers, firefighters and other specialist units were also at the scene.

No-one was injured, there was no danger to passengers and no-one was being treated as a suspect after armed officers evacuated the Megabus coach, police said.

The spokeswoman said: "We can now confirm that, whilst this was a genuine security alert, the significant concerns reported to us were unfounded.

"It's important to state that no criminal offence has been committed and no passenger or any other member of the public is being treated as a suspect.

"We would like to apologise for any inconvenience and hope that the public understand that we have our duty to safeguard public safety."
'Felt uneasy'

Jenny Lister, who was on the coach, said when people got off "there were armed police aiming at us".

She said: "We... were told to sit in rows and not talk to each other. There was a small area of the motorway where we were told to sit and stay. It was probably 45 minutes to an hour that we were sat there.

"The worst part was being stuck on the bus not knowing what was going on."

Witness Nick Jones, who was stopped on the motorway for more than an hour-and-a-half, said police warned him to stay in his car, keep his windows closed and not to use air conditioning.

He said: "I was beginning to feel a little uneasy."

A spokeswoman for Megabus, which is operated by Stagecoach, said all 48 passengers booked on the service were safe and well.

She said: "We are assisting police with their inquiries into an allegation made against a passenger who was travelling on the 05.10 Preston to London service.

"There were 48 people booked to travel on board the service, which was due to arrive at Victoria Coach Station in London at 10.55am.

"Police have confirmed that all passengers are safe and well and they have been transferred to a substitute vehicle."

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Oh, that kind of fag.

[maiforpeace]

Indeed, you guys are getting a little jumpy over there.

[mistermack]

The police are a joke.

They have their procedures, but often not an ounce of common sense.
Fifty years ago, they would have seen what happened, and said "ok, on your way" within minutes.
Now they close the motorway for most of the day, and cost the country a fortune in their wages, and lost revenue.
And the people on that bus have been put through the wringer for a cigarette.

It would have been obvious within minutes that this was a false alarm.

What they are doing is just covering their backs. It's a false alarm, but if it turned out that a real terrorist was on the bus as well, the press would murder them.

So they fuck everybody's day up, and cost the country a fortune, just to make sure that THEY don't end up being criticised in the press.

[Atheist-Lite]

[Rum]

What the fuck is that meant to be?

[Pappa]

What the fuck is that meant to be?

Someone smoking a fag.

[mistermack]

Does anybody know why they are called fags?

I'm guessing that it's short for faggot, which was originally a bundle of sticks for the fire.
God knows why homosexuals are called faggots in America though.

[maiforpeace]

Does anybody know why they are called fags?

I'm guessing that it's short for faggot, which was originally a bundle of sticks for the fire.
God knows why homosexuals are called faggots in America though.

How did "faggot" get to mean "male homosexual"?

July 29, 2003

Dear Straight Dope:

I recently reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy and I've always been curious about Tolkien's casual use of the term faggot. I guess that in Britain the term does not carry a negative connotation and is used as slang for cigarettes and whatnot, but it still gets me thinking. How can a word go from meaning "a bundle of sticks" to "homosexual male"? I've looked elsewhere on the Internet, but I haven't been able to find any unbiased resources or even biased ones that state their sources. They all say that it goes back to heretics being forced to carry the faggots for their own execution at the stake. Forgive me for being skeptical, but this sounds a heckuva lot like the story about the origin of the term "rule of thumb," albeit backward.

— Josh G.

Well, Josh, you're right to think that the British historically haven't found "faggot" offensive--with the exception of a vile-tasting meatball currently marketed in the UK as Mr. Brain's Faggots. One of the advertising lines says, "It's no wonder 100 million faggots are eaten in the UK every year!" As Dave Barry says, "I'm NOT making this up."

It took Americans to apply the term to male homosexuals. First some history.

The term faggot or fagot, meaning bundle of sticks, shows up around 1300 in English. It almost certainly came from Old French, possibly going back to Greek phakelos. Since those bundles of sticks were mainly used for fires, it's not surprising that the term came to mean burning sticks. Then there was that nasty business in medieval times where heretics were burned at the stake. Some later cites indicate heretics who repented and were spared a fiery death had to wear a picture of a faggot on their sleeve to show what might have been their fate. But no print evidence exists that homosexuals were referred to as faggots before the twentieth century, with the origin definitely in the U.S., not Britain.

The British continued to use the words fag and faggot as nouns, verbs and adjectives right through the early 20th century, never applying it to homosexuals at any time. To fag or to be a fag was a common term in British schools from the late 1700s and referred to a lower classman who performed chores for upperclassmen. While this term was also in vogue at Harvard in the first half of the 19th century, it died out by the mid-1800s in the U.S., leaving it in use only in England. Nineteenth century Britons also heard "faggot" used in reference to an ill-tempered woman, i.e., a ball-buster, a battleaxe, a shrew. That meaning of the term continued into the early 20th century, and the usage was gradually applied to children as well as women. The relationship, if any, between faggot-as-bundle-of-sticks and faggot-as-shrewish-woman is unknown.

The first known published use of the word faggot or fag to refer to a male homosexual appeared in 1914 in the U.S. It referred to a homosexual ball where the men were dressed in drag and called them "fagots (sissies)." Ernest Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises (1926), included the line, "You're a hell of a good guy, and I'm fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn't tell you that in New York. It'd mean I was a faggot." A 1921 cite says, "Androgynes [are] known as 'fairies,' 'fags,' or 'brownies.'"

George Chauncey, in his excellent 1994 work Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, says that the terms fairy, faggot, and queen were used by homosexuals to refer to men who were ostentatiously effeminate. Homosexuals who were not as showy referred to themselves as "queer" in the first decades of the 20th century. But the general public mainly called homosexuals "fairies." If you were in London in the 1920s through the 1940s and used the term "fag," the man in the street might have offered you a cigarette, and quite possibly that would have been the case with many Americans at the time.

All of this does little to answer your original question: How did a bundle of sticks come to mean a homosexual male? Most likely it didn't. Here we'll have to go to theory. Since I'm writing this, mine will have to do.

We notice with some words a progression of usage that morphs along the lines of "woman/girl" > "woman/girl/child" > "effeminate male" > "homosexual male." The word fairy is a good example. "Faggot" in the sense of an ill-tempered woman is another. I independently came to that conclusion while answering a general question on the SDMB. But, in a post to the American Dialect Society mailing list, Dr. Laurence Horn, professor of linguistics at Yale University, posted the progression that I just used (he did it much more succinctly than I could). Still unexplained is how a Britishism jumped the ocean in a short period of time to acquire a new meaning in the U.S. Perhaps it was an independent formation. Words happen.

As a last thought, a current notion holds that the Yiddish word faygeleh, "little bird," might have been the source, but lacks evidence other than the claim that the word was commonly used in Yiddish prior to WWII to indicate a homosexual. With the digitizing of publications allowing searching never before possible, perhaps some further scholarship will be forthcoming to help solve the mystery.

Resources: Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, edited by J. E. Lighter, New York, 1994-1997.

[Clinton Huxley]

It's Health and Safety gone mad!

[Rum]

They arrested seven 'suspects' after finding weapons somewhere in South Yorkshire this morning. Could be the over-reaction was part of a wider alert it turns out.

As an aside one can't help but wonder about the intelligence of these jihadist types (which they appear to be). The car they were in and arrested from was uninsured. The police can check this stuff really easily from every police car and so so as a matter of course with anything suspicious..

[Coito ergo sum]

[MrJonno]

Whats quite interesting about the SAM on the roof is one of the reasons the tenants are complaining is they claim it makes them a terrorist target (like they don't have a lot easier ones). Imagine Americans saying we don't want no big guns/missiles as it makes us more vulnerable

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Whats quite interesting about the SAM on the roof is one of the reasons the tenants are complaining is they claim it makes them a terrorist target (like they don't have a lot easier ones). Imagine Americans saying we don't want no big guns/missiles as it makes us more vulnerable

Terrorists are, by and large, cowards, so they won't be going after someone who can fight back. And there will be protection for those missiles, overt or not.

[MrJonno]

Oh I agree their reasoning (in this particular case) than having SAM's on the roof is not going to put them in any danger, now giving them the SAM's themselves would a be different matter