In the US, ‘Fanny’ means buttocks, and is (I think) not considered as rude a word as ‘ass’, which means it is probably not rude at all, considering how common it is to hear ‘ass’ on radio and TV in US these days.
In Australia, ‘Fanny’ means vagina, and it seems it might be as rude a word as c#nt (I don’t want to bother with reading guidelines right now to know if I should spell that one).
How about England? It seems like they use it like the Aussies. Thus we have a 2-1 vote that the Americans are the dummies that have the meaning ‘turned around front to back’.
However, I find Fanny as a nickname for Frances in England pretty recently. What gives?
Having nearly gotten slapped by a British tourist for asking her to remove her fanny pack (bum bag) for a family photograph, I was curtly informed it means the front of the ‘nether areas’ and asked not to say that in front of the children.
And Fanny = Frances recently? Fanny Hill was written by John Cleland in 1749, not to mention the Fannie Farmer candy company.
An American dance teacher of mine was once teaching an Australian lady a private lesson. At one point, he said to her, “This step is really difficult to describe in words - would you mind if I put my hand on your fanny to show you how to time the action?”
She exclaimed, “you most certainly may NOT,” and stormed out of the room. Fortunately, there was a British teacher around who was able to explain to him what had just happened, once he managed to stop laughing.
According to the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, it meant female genitals first (recorded in the late 19th century), and buttocks only later (recorded in the early 20th century). In both senses, the origin is unknown according to the NSOED…
According to The Wordsworth Book of Euphemism, it was used as a synonym for female genitals at least as early as 1860, probably named for Fanny Hill (published 1749). As a synonym for buttocks, it “probably originated in the 19th century”, but no etymology is given.
St. Peter waits on the first couple, asks a couple of questions, takes some notes and then goes off to check the records. He comes back a short time later and says, “Sorry, your wife’s name is Penny and all you ever thought about was money. You can’t come in.”
Same thing with the second couple. A few questions, and St. Peter goes back to check. Comes back and says, “I’m sorry, you’re wife’s name is Sherry and all you ever thought about was liquor. You can’t come in.”
The third couple comes up, answers the questions, and while St. Peter is gone the husband says, “I don’t think we’re gonna make it, Fanny!”
To echo biliophage, Lighter cites a bawdy song book from 1835-40 using it to mean vagina. Amazingly, the US meaning of ass first appears in print 1919 in soldier slang.
My great-grandmother, born (I believe) in the 1890’s, went by “Fanny”. Every single thing I saw written about her at her funeral referred to her that way, making me suspect that it was her legal first name (i.e., not short for something else).
New Zealand seems to follow the US usage – from whom we may well have inherited it.
I’ve heard the term “fanny pack” used for a bag worn around the waist and positioned to the rear, along with people saying “Move your fanny”, or somesuch in a jovial tone as request for someone to move along a bench or couch and make space for another seat.
However the UK hasn’t always seen Fanny as primarily referring to the genitals. In the late forties a very popular British film had the now-quaint title Fanny By Gaslight.
It was a serious melodrama, not a risque farce, with James Mason as an evil (but demned handsome!) nobleman, who tries to despoil the heroine.
I cannot conceive that the cinemas would advertise a title with such risible connotations, unless the innocent meaning of the word dominated.
The plot, by the way, involved Fanny as a young woman who grows into adulthood never realising that her father runs a huge saloon and brothel in the basement of their family home. Well, times were simpler then…
Redfanny
My great-aunt (b. 1905 in West Virginia) was a Fannie. I’m sure it wasn’t her nickname because I’ve seen it on a census schedule, a government form, and a death certificate.
It’s a conflation I’ve seen before. People speak of “ass” but also of a “piece of ass” and, from there, of “getting some ass”, and in the latter two cases are referring to vaginal access. Similarly, “tail” is used as a euphemism for “ass” or “butt”, e.g., "get your tail in here"or “move your tail” but I’ve also seen “piece of tail”…
I find it weird and surprising, but it does seem to reoccur. The posterior terms get borrowed as euphemisms for the vaginal in most cases, although with “fanny” it sounds as if the progress was most likely in reverse.
When I was a young teenager, I was confused enough about “ass” to think that the girl across the street was nonchalantly telling us she had a large vagina when she said she had a “big ass”.
*When studying the Proto-World roots of words, I found that the words derived from *PUTI ‘vulva’ in many different languages came to mean either ‘vulva’ or ‘anus’ (or just ‘hole’). I posted a list in the thread Terminology for the female reproductive area of words for vulva, but in one of the sources I drew from (On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy by Merritt Ruhlen, p. 319-321), a lot of other words derived from *PUTI meant anus or buttocks. (Shake your puti).
The Hindi slang word for vulva/genitals/anus, puttu, is probably derived from Sanskrit putau, ‘anus’. Or it may come from Dravidian, in which for example you have Tamil puNTai for ‘vulva’ and Telugu puDi for ‘anus’. In other languages, for example Svan put‘u or Proto-Eskimo-Aleut *putu], it simply means ‘hole’. In Proto-Afro-Asiatic the root *pwt means ‘hole, anus, vulva’: Ganjule pote ‘vagina’, Hebrew pot ‘vulva’, Somali fúto ‘anus’, Darasa fido ‘genitals’, Oromo fuji ‘vulva’, Jegu paate ‘vulva’, Angas fut ‘hole’.
Frankly I find it disturbing, all this evidence from languages around the world that people keep confusing one hole with another. I certainly have no trouble telling the difference!
Here’s a somewhat similar tale that goes the opposite way.
When I was in ninth grade here in the U.S., we had a science teacher who was from England. I’m not sure how she ended up in our school; perhaps there was an exhange teacher program along the same line as the exchange student one.
In any case, her use of a British term for what we would call a pencil eraser caused a great deal of snickering when she announced at the beginning of class one day:
“Well, we’re having an examination today, so I hope you’ve all brought your pencils and your rubbers!”
I’m from Australia and we’ve been aware of the “fanny” problem for a while now.
We also call your behind, your “bum”. It never describes a homeless person in Australia though from the various USA influences we know that Americans do.
Anyway the point I want to make is that lately we have taken to calling a vagina a “front bum”
The name Fanny is very rare here now. The last person I ever heard of who was called that was the TV cook Fanny Craddock (not her real name anyway). She was quite a flambuoyant personality in the 1960s and died quite recently.
Anyway, she often appeared with her husband, Johnny, as a bizarre double act. She did the cooking and he was in charge of the wine, and they made a weak running joke about him drinking too much of it. It’s an apocryphal story, but apparently one time she was showing how to make pancakes, and to close the show he said to the audience “And I hope all your pancakes turn out just like Fanny’s”.
Unfortunately some early settlers brought fannies into the country, and many escaped from captivity and multiplied. The deserts of inner Australia are now seething with feral fannies, huge flocks of them sweeping majestically over the rolling hills of the outback attacking stray sheep and eroding the soil. Although admittedly cute, these timid creatures are an ecological timebomb etc etc etc.
Welcome to the place Oystaman. You can meet some other DownUnder Dopers at this thread. Most of them are more sensible than me.