Originally confined to the United States,[REF] the use of the words fag and faggot as epithets for gay men has spread elsewhere in the English-speaking world, but the extent to which they are used in this sense has varied outside the context of imported U.S. popular culture.
The terms fag/fagging, have been widely used for a practice of younger pupils acting as personal servants to the most senior boys for well over a hundred years in England, in the public school system of education.