Baedling
From Homolexis Glossary
The word baedling,
a diminutive of baeddel, occurs in an Old English glossary as
the equivalent of the Latin terms effeminatus and mollis,
designating the effeminate homosexual. A synonym is the word
waepenwifstere (approximately, "male wife"].
Evidently, these words reflect an Anglo-Saxon stereotype of the
homosexual as an unwarlike, womanish type. In all likelihood, this
negative concept derives in part from a common Germanic archetype,
attested by a passage in Germania (12) by the Roman historian
Tacitus--where death by drowning is stipulated for such
individuals--but probably modified in the early Middle Ages by
Mediterranean-Christian influences. Similar in form to baedling is
deorling, the source of the modern English darling.
While the Old English word had a general sense of a beloved person or thing, it was also used more specifically to label a minion, a youth favored because of his sexual attractiveness. At the present stage of research further data about homosexual behavior in Anglo-Saxon times (that is, from ca. 500 to 1066) remains elusive. For its part, however, the word baeddel survived, turning eventually--through a process of semantic expansion--into the general English adjective of pejoration, "bad." The word also forms part of two place names in England: Baddlesmere ("baeddells lake") in Kent and Baddlinghame ("the home of the baedlings") in Cambridgeshire.
The broadening of the meaning of the word baeddel in the direction of general disparagement ["bad"] has several historical parallels. The first, from another Germanic sphere, is the shift from old Scandinavian argr, cowardly, effeminate, to modem German arg, bad, wicked. Then early medieval France seems to have witnessed the creation of felo/felonis, evil person (the etymon of our legal term felon) from Latin fellare, to fellate. It is also possible that Russian plokhoi, bad, is cognate with Greek malakos (with change of the initial labial from m to p), as the Polish plochy has the meaning of "timid, fearful," another of the nuances of argr.
