(Tasteless and obscene, in two languages, so not to everyone’s taste)
(#1) A rainbow raised fist, representing proud defiance; image from Redbubble, by designer MAS-S (in Berlin, Germany)
And now the frocio ‘queer, homo, faggot, fairy, queen’ mock-Pope intoning benedico questa frociata ‘I bless this faggotry’ (more literally, ‘this faggoting’) at the 6/15 Pride celebration in Rome, where t-shirts proclaimed “There is never too much frociaggine” — never too much faggotry — as participants enthusiastically embraced every vulgar insult they know (but especially frociaggine), turning them into proud badges of identity and defiance, raising the rainbow fist:
(#2) (photo from the National Catholic Reporter on 6/16/24)
I’ll just jump right in with bits from the New York Times story on Rome’s Pride celebration (in print on 6/17), on-line on 6/16: “Italians Respond to Pope’s Slur by Taking Francis to Pride: At Saturday’s celebration in Rome, Pope Francis’ image was on cardboard cutouts adorned with flower necklaces. People came dressed as the pope, wore papal hats and said that there was never too much “gayness”” [AZ: well, never too much frociaggine ‘faggotry’]:
[There were] T-shirts that read, “There is never too much frociaggine,” a reference to an offensive slur against gay men that the pope has been accused of using twice in recent weeks.
The slur “is the slogan of the 2024 Pride,” said Martina Lorina, 28, an actress who was holding up a banner bearing the word.
After Italian media reported that Pope Francis used the slur at a meeting with priests to complain that there was too much “gayness” in the church, the Vatican apologized.
But Rome’s Pride attendees took a different tack to respond to the insult: They made it their own. Pride participants symbolically invited the pope and his slur to the party, using a longtime tactic of the L.G.B.T.Q. community to turn insults into words of pride.
… Emiliano Sisolfi, 22, a director, carried a banner with a photograph of Francis with his thumb up and another usage of the slur. Mr. Sisolfi said he printed the insult in rainbow letters to neutralize it.
“If I laugh about the word,” he said, “they have no more words to offend us.”
Giacomo Canarezza, 31, said that even if the slur was derogatory, “If I take ownership of the word, I can use it as a marker of my identity.”
He added, “It makes you immune from any insult.”
Lexicographic notes. The noun frociata (roughly, ‘faggoting’) in the mock-Pope’s blessing is a vulgar slang term, apparently (like the noun frocio on which it’s based) originally a Roman slur. The suffix in it is –ata, forming
nouns, derived from nouns with a negative connotation, expressing an action (Wiktionary)
Then, from Mark Liberman on Language Log on 6/8, in “Frociaggine”:
Wiktionary glosses frociaggine as “(vulgar, derogatory) faggotry”, and explains the etymology as
From frocio + –aggine.
…where –aggine is “added to adjectives to form nouns denoting a quality, typically negative”, and frocio is given two senses. … The second (and relevant) one can be an adjective, glossed as “(vulgar, mostly derogatory) gay, homosexual”, or a noun, which is given [the major gloss]:
1. (vulgar, derogatory, outgroup) gay man, poof, faggot
Both the adjective and noun forms are flagged as “originally Rome”, with [an] “Uncertain” etymology
(Some Italian-speaking commenters on ML’s posting didn’t recognize frociaggine and therefore doubted its existence, suggesting it was just made up. Well, everybody goes on what they know, but what people know depends on their individual life experiences, including where they’ve lived and who they interact with, so it’s limited. In any case the form is robustly attested in Roman vulgar slang.)
The historical origins of frocio and its related items look like a morass. I won’t rehearse the various speculations that ML dutifully inventories. The fact is that we don’t have any accounts of the developing usages in their social contexts, and we’re unlikely to ever get such accounts at the needed level of detail.
It’s also possible that frocio is a bit of slang concocted from bits and pieces of existing slang and assorted phonesthemic material, to give something that sounds good / funny / dirty / powerful / whatever (the way trade names are sometimes invented; some slang comes that way too). In which case it doesn’t have an ordinary etymology at all.
In the circumstances, my impulse is not to dwell on the historical origins of frocio and its kin. But to try to find out more about how various people — including the froci of Rome, as well as the homophobes of Rome — use the words, with whom, in what contexts, for what purposes.