Pansy

An old insult for an effeminate or gay man, from the delicate garden flower; in use since the First World War, now dated and often said with irony.

Pansy is an old insult for an effeminate or gay man: soft, pretty, fragile, not a real man, in the speaker's opinion. It belongs to the same flowerbed as fairy and the same family as sissy and nancy: words that hit a man by calling him a girl, and a delicate one.

Today it sounds dated, almost quaint, which is part of its charm when we use it ourselves and part of its sting when a straight man does. It can also drift loose from sexuality entirely: "don't be such a pansy" is said to any man who whines about the cold.

Where it comes from

Before it meant us, pansy was a compliment. In 1890s American slang a pansy was an admirable person, a real daisy. The gay meaning appears during the First World War: Green's Dictionary of Slang has E.E. Cummings writing in 1917 that the nickname of a tentmate was "Pansy", and an Australian soldiers' paper in 1919 explaining that a rosy-cheeked, soft-spoken new arrival was called Pansy "from the jump". By 1930 a gangster novel could have a man growl "I ain't no pansy" and expect every reader to get it.

The choice of flower is no accident. A pansy is small, colorful and decorative, everything a "real man" was supposed not to be.

The pansy craze

For a few years around 1930 the word had its moment in the spotlight. In New York, Prohibition-era nightclubs put openly effeminate entertainers on stage, and straight audiences flocked to see them: historians call it the pansy craze. A Baltimore newspaper ran the headline "The pansy craze: Is it entertainment or just plain filth?" in 1934. The fashion did not last: by the mid-1930s, with Prohibition gone and the police cracking down, gay performers were pushed out of the mainstream and back into the shadows.

How it is used today

From the 1930s to the 1970s pansy was everyday abuse, in hardboiled novels, in newspapers and in the street: in 1952 a best-selling exposé sneered at "the pansies in the State Department". It was the kind of word that came with a punch.

Today it has lost most of its venom, mainly because it sounds like something your granddad would say. Among ourselves it comes out with irony, often in self-mockery about being bad at sport or terrified of spiders. From a straight man it still reads as a put-down, and the older a gay man is, the more likely he heard it shouted at him.

If you want the whole family tree, look at queer and fag for words that were reclaimed with intent, and at camp for what we did with the effeminacy the insults were aimed at.

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