Faggot is the most vulgar word you can use against a gay person, and using it to insult a straight person is not any better.
Using it "at" a straight person is imprecise, if not actually using a "wrong" word - when there are adequate big insults available that are more precise - some of them rather elegant and inventive. (Centexfarmer - now CTF - was very good at imagining new "insult" PHRASES by putting words together that had probably never been put together before, LOL.)
^^The "C" word is the most aggressive of them all.In England it sounds very aggressive when used In an argument even Big Brother won't allow their housemates to use it very often.
Cincinnati?
chimney?
contretemps?
cup? ("I went around the corner, to C. U. P.")
Oh...you clarified...actually I wasn't really sure whether it was the short word, or a rather longer one which sometimes replaces "a homosexual." It was the short word. Though, in some circumstances (IT INVOLVES CONTEXT, as well as one's knowledge of possible word origins***), I can see where "cocksucker" can be more of an insult than "faggot." Faggot is a rather "generic" word, but cocksucker is a word that wants to define us as people who never, ever do anything but have sex with each other.
***However, I've seen some derivation, which I'm not sure is true, suggesting that "faggot" came from the term for the sticks/stakes which are placed under a person who is fastened or tied to something, then set ablaze and burned to death. I think it IS true that small sticks are "faggots" or MAYBE it's "fagots." If this is a true derivation, it makes the word "faggot" extremely insulting, indeed - and I tend to think there's some truth to that.
Therefore, faggot is a word that I virtually never use. The exception is if I'm talking about the antigay mindset that continues to want to oppress us, because I know damned good-and-well that "faggot" is a word fairly commonly used in such [private] conversations that we're not privy to.
"Fag" (not addressed in this thread) is a rather different word, though it obviously has the same root. I heard it more often used as an endearing comment within the community, possibly because it just DOESN'T have the "awful" sound that faggot does. (Faggot, after all, rhymes with only one other common word...MAGGOT. That adds baggage to it as well. It ALMOST rhymes with baguette, which is a much friendlier and tastier word, LOL.) The phrase "fag hag" is almost never a disrespectful one. That term is now indelibly planted in my mind with Debbie from Queer As Folk (Michael's mother in the "American" version). I liked her character a lot.
YES, "AMERICAN" IN QUOTES - because, actually, the "American version" was the *CANADIAN* version. It was filmed in Toronto, though it was "set" in Pittsburgh.
In the UK it eans a meat ball. Nothing offensive there
You don't say??? That's a "new one" on me.