Well, really, who was Nellie Bly? Or Annie Laurie? Or Lili Marlene?
All fictional really.
No. “Fan” in the meaning of enthusiast (as a shortened form of “fanatic”) dates to 1889, and was first used in baseball.
Another Jingle Bells curiosity: whence the commonly sung addition of “ha ha ha” after the line “laughing all the way”?
As a child in the sixties, I don’t recall anyone doing that - now it seems de rigeur. Always done a shade insincerely, as in “we know what a bunch of nostalgic buncombe this song, and its depiction of an activity few of us have ever personally experienced, is; let us now gently mock it and the top-hatted, sideburn-joweled swell who spawned it”.
Plenty of Aussies right here on the forum, me for instance. While “fanny” definitely means “lady parts” everywhere but the US (where it means “arse”, which yanks call “ass”), there’s no meaning of “bright” I’ve ever heard apart from “light” or “clever”.
Does any question posed on this board matter? These kind of “answers” are annoying but to come from a charter member…
Definitely not a mondegreen; I’ve performed it this way in school choir.
Now, now, PlainJain, don’t get yourself all upsot.
mmm
Well, damn. I’m pushing 60, and I never heard or read more than the first verse of that song before now.
While we can all snicker at the slang meanings of “fanny,” it is indeed a legitimate first name (e.g. Fanny Farmer) and probably didn’t conjure up those meanings when it was more commonly used.
But Batman still smells.
It’s the difference between British slang and American slang. Fanny means vulva in Britain. In America, the term has always meant buttocks. It’s a quite dirty term in Britain, but a polite euphemism in America.
Usage shows it to appear much later than we would think. It didn’t start showing up in American slang until the 1920s, so any use of it in the 19th century would be innocent. And even though it seems likely that the term came from John Cleland’s 1748 book Fanny Hill, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, it doesn’t appear in the modern sense until the 1830s. Heck, Jane Austin used Fanny for the heroine in Mansfield Park.
Like many slang terms, especially obscene slang, fanny probably was used earlier than the print first usages. Whether Cleland was using a current term I don’t know, but Fanny Hill = public mound, a pun on the Latin term mons veneris works too well to be complete coincidence, so I bet he did. We discussed it more in this thread.
While Fanny Hill’s own mons was open to the general public, I suspect you meant pubic.
I did, but now I’m thinking I like mine better!
Did she just lay down and dee?
The problem with this theory is that Fanny was a very common female name during certain eras.
I’d liken it to the name Dick. It’s such a common man’s name (or nickname anyway) that you can’t assume any off-color slang meaning without some other indication that the author intended it that way.
Not just in Britain - as I noted several post up, it means that in Australia, and to the best of my knowledge that’s what it means in every native English-speaking country except the USA and maybe Canada, which picks up a lot more US influence.
Australia isn’t part of Britain. New Zealand isn’t part of Britain. The Republic of Ireland, while part of the British Isles, is not part of Great Britain. India, South Africa, and so on. All places where English is either the native language or one of them, all not Britain.
It irritates me when Americans act like they’re the only English speakers outside the UK.
You may be interested to know that–believe it or not–China is one of the countries with the most English speakers, because of its sheer high population.
Well, it irritates me when people drag in irrelevancies to threads. I was talking about 18th & 19th century slang usage in Britain and America and how one might have influenced the other. That additional countries later adopted the same slang may be true but it has no part in this discussion. Context is everything.
nm