Just came accross this on youtube- Some old silent footage from a fakir festival.
Some interesting stuff in there!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_68rGKw9QSM&feature=related
Gwyd

Cool stuff.

I liked how they added the woman to the car, y'know, to make it dangerous.

Audience reaction shots were an excellent addition as well.

The iron tongue may have been gaffed though, it was done often. Some charlatans used gaffs while calling themselves fakirs. Todays vernacular of "faker" is based on this.

May have been?

From Online Etymology Dictionary:

fake

attested in London criminal slang as adj. (1775), verb (1812), and noun (1827), but probably older. Likely source is feague "to spruce up by artificial means," from Ger. fegen "polish, sweep," also "to clear out, plunder" in colloquial use. "Much of our early thieves' slang is Ger. or Du., and dates from the Thirty Years' War" [Weekley]. Or it may be from L. facere "to do."

Yours,

Paul

Yeah, put "faker" in the same search engine and see what comes up! Lots of words have unkown origins, so we go by what we THINK it may have come from. This is especially true with slang and expletives. I may be wrong, but I read about faker/fakir in school.

The big "S" word "SUPPOSEDLY" came from this story:

Back during days of early transcontinental shipping, manure and waste would be kept in the lower holds of the ships. Being that the lower portion of ships were damp, the offal would ferment and release large pockets of methane gas. A wandering sailor holding an oil lamp would go down to the holds, igniting the methane with the lamps flame. Ka-boom! In order to prevent this occurence from happening again, all manure shipments were marked clearly to "Ship High In Transport" thereby giving us an acronym to use.

Similar to the "F" word... I've heard that it meant "Fornication Under Consent of the King". I highly doubt both, seeing how illiterate common people were hundreds of years ago, let alone to understand acronyms.

The F. U. C. K. one is a myth from what I've read.

I've always believed it to mean "False Use of Carny Knowledge.

Erik just found a way around the profanity filters here at the Café'.

S. H. I. T. that's pretty good!

My Father was in law enforcement for 35 years. Retired Major. He was taught it was an old police term originally meaning "Fornication Under Carnal Knowledge." Which is still a crime in some counties. Ya got to be married to do it.

Oh, and great clip. Thanks for sharing!

But what would that even mean? Carnal knowledge is sexual intercourse, and fornication is sexual intercourse between an unmarried couple. So, sexual intercourse between an unmarried couple under sexual intercourse? Does that mean four people stacked up like some kind of horny cord wood?

A pile of wood is a f.a.g.g.o.t.

Right--four people stacked up like some kind of horny f.a.g.g.o.t.

I think Carnal was implying lustful not sex. So then it would be sex for lustful reasons and not wedded love? I don't know, just what the old man told me.

A dork is a whale dick.

It's funn, you can't write p.e.n.i.s. but dick is fine. Yeah I know its because it's a name, but still.

If a pile of wood is a f.a.g.g.o.t. what is a pile of woodies?

Destiny

A stack of hard on?

A pile of metal to be welded into a billet is called a fagot weld (note the single G).

The bassoon used to be known as a fagotto, or fagotte.

Nowadays, they're tuned to C, not G.