And right here lies a wild linguistic tale! Did you know that the anti-queer slur "faggot" comes down to English in an unbroken lineage from the same word the Republican Roman "fasces" comes from? The fasces were bundles of rods (sticks) that some Roman magistrates had carried in front of them while in public to symbolize their power to punish Roman citizens. Outside the city of Rome, the fasces had an axe inserted in the middle to symbolize the magistrate's authority to legally kill people.

The Romans took the word from a Greek word for sticks, and that same word was popular in Vulgar Latin both inside and outside the Italian peninsula, where it came to be used for any bundle of sticks.

The word made its way into English from Middle French, a direct descendent of Vulgar Latin. For a few centuries in English, the general sense of "faggot" was "bundle of sticks,"eventually narrowed to mean a broom made of twigs.

Two senses remain in English today. The first is "fag" for cigarette, because a cigarette resembles a burning twig.

The other sense is "faggot" as an anti-queer slur. Why? That use started in the Northeast of the what became the U.S. during colonial times, and really got going in the 19th century -- as a pejorative for men who do "women's work" like using a broom.

That sense was likely reinforced by the British public school tradition of "fagging," where a junior boy was required to do cleanup chores and other personal duties for a senior boy. The fagging custom also became associated with the younger performing sexual services for the older, a tradition that continued at least through the school career of Stephen Fry, who writes about it in a semi-autobiographical novel and in his memoirs.

So, what a wild ride! The same word that ended up being adopted by Mussolini to describe authoritarian government and the state power to punish and kill came down in English as a sexist slur against queer men.