Frociaggine

Angela Giuffrida, "Pope Francis allegedly used offensive slur during discussion about gay men", The Guardian 5/27/2024:

Pope Francis allegedly used an offensive slur during a discussion with bishops over admitting homosexual men into seminaries, several Italian newspapers have reported.

The pontiff, 87, is alleged to have made the remark during a closed-door meeting with bishops in Rome last week, where they were reportedly discussing whether out gay men should be admitted to Catholic seminaries, where priests are trained, a topic that the Italian bishops conference (CEI) is said to have been pondering for some time.

During the discussion, when one of the bishops asked Francis what he should do, the pope reportedly reiterated his objection to admitting gay men, saying that while it was important to embrace everyone, it was likely that a gay person could risk leading a double life. He is then alleged to have added that there was already too much “frociaggine”, a vulgar Italian word that roughly translates at “faggotness”, in some seminaries.

Needless to say, this got plenty of coverage in U.S. media as well as in Italy and also elsewhere, and has been on my to-blog list ever since the articles first came out.

And also needless to say, my first reaction was to wonder about the morphology and the etymology of the "slur". 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 first is flagged as  (derogatory, Rome, dated), glossed as "German", and given the suggested etymology "Probably from frocia ('nostril')". The second (and relevant) one can be an adjective, glossed as "(vulgar, mostly derogatory) gay, homosexual", or a noun, which is given two glosses:

1. (vulgar, derogatory, outgroup) gay man, poof, faggot
2. (friendly, ingroup) homosexual person, especially a gay man

Both the adjective and noun forms are flagged as "originally Rome", with this "Uncertain" etymology:

• Likely from Latin flūxus (passed through a minor Italian cognate stratum). Cognate with floscio (and the regional froscio), Galician frouxo, Portuguese chocho, Sicilian frocia, Spanish flojo.
• Others believe to be same as above, with a semantical shift. Alternatively from Venetian fenocio (“(slang) gay”) with rhoticisation of the /-n-/ by influence of the above term.

In "Concerning 'Faggotry' – an Italian View", 1P5 6/4/2024, Aurelio Porfiri lists four hypotheses about the root word frocio, which he credits to an article in Focus Magazine. Three of the four are quite different from Wiktionary's hypotheses:

[T]he first hypothesis is that this term could be a dialectal corruption of the term français, “French,” made in the Napoleonic era. So the Romans called the French invaders “froscè” using a distortion of the term français. At this time, if this etymology is true, the word did not have a meaning referring to unnatural sexual desires.

The second hypothesis is that this term derives from the Spanish flojo which means “flabby” and in this case it is obviously a little more “offensive to pious ears” because it refers to the male organ of the homosexual.

The third hypothesis is that in Italian dialects there is a phrase frociare”which means “to make faces.” So in this case we would be referring to the attitudes of those particularly effeminate homosexuals. So here we also come to what Pope Francis probably meant, that is, he meant to refer to this type of homosexual culture, that of the ostentation of homosexuality.

The fourth hypothesis, which is also the kindest towards homosexuals, is that the term derives from the Latin flos which means “flower,” indicating that homosexual people have a particular sensitivity like that of a flower.

The description of Roman forscè as a local pronunciation of français suggests that Wikipedia's entry for frocio == "German" was not from the word for "nostril", but rather was a corruption of (the local word for) "French".  If so, it would be parallel to the generalization of  French/Frankish as the source of words for "European" in the Middle East and South Asia — see "Were the French the Yankees of Medieval Europe?", 12/16/2003.

The content of the pope's complaint about the culture of seminaries reminded me of a memorable childhood experience. This happened in 1957 or 1958, when I was 10 years old. I was fishing for pickerel with a couple of friends in the  Fenton River. We came to a bend in the river where there was a nice pool, next to a sort of semi-beach, where people (including us) often went to swim. There were three young men lounging there, two of them fully dressed with clerical collars and the third stripped down to bathing trunks. One of them described meeting Cardinal Francis Spellman in New York City, and another joked (something like) "So I supposed you knelt, kissed his ring, looking up into his eyes, and said 'Francis, you bitch…'".

At the time, I had no idea what that meant, but it formed a vivid memory.

Whatever the personal predilections of those priests, Cardinal Spellman's sexual orientation and practices were apparently notorious.