Just wondering: in America, fanny is an innocuous, somewhat childish term for the butt. In England, and Australia, and probably other English-speaking countries as well, fanny is a crude term for female genitalia.
How did the American fanny go from front to back and rude to something you’d say to a class of kindergarteners? Did the meaning and the politeness level change at the same time, or did one come before the other?
I don’t know the answer but I wanted to add to your thread - don’t ever say “fannypack” to an Englishman. Oo boy, he will never stop mocking you.
The OED isn’t much help, giving ‘origin unknown’ for both British and American senses. FWIW the earliest cites are for the British sense.
Here’s the entry with a few early cites.
America isn’t the only place where “fanny” = “buttocks”. Look up the game of petanque and the usage of the term “fanny” there.
I have no idea of the relationship betwween these terms, but, clearly, there’s more to the history of “fanny” than simply Americans swtiching around the British terms. Has the British slang term always referred strictly to genitalia? Or has this been a case where a term for general unspeakables got restricted to one area in Britain (and other English-speaking countries) and a different are in America?
In my family tree a few generations back there is a woman named Fanny. Imagine traveling to England with that name :X
And vice versa for the equivalent British term, ‘bum pack’. snicker
The third verse of Jingle Bells:
Lots and lots of women in Victorian times were called Fanny - a very common name.
In British slang there’s a phrase Sweet Fanny Adams, which has come to be a politer version of Sweet FA. But my Dad used to call me Fanny Adams when I misbehaved and even today (he’s in his mid-seventies) he refers to any female that he doesn’t approve of as Fanny Adams. (Like a co-worker he hated - he’d always come home and say “Fanny Adams was up to her tricks again today” etc.)
So, thanks to this thread I just looked up Fanny Adams and was saddened to see that the original was an eight year old girl murdered in the 1800’s, disemboweled and disfigured. Sailors then started referring to their rations as Fanny Adams (her guts were spread over a wide area) and from there on it came to mean “nothing” or “worthless” and then expanded to cover Sweet FA.
Poor little girl…
It’s hard to believe there’s no connection to John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure better known as Fanny Hill. The name is dead giveaway and the British audience, who all learned Latin at school, would absolutely get the pun on mons veneris. The book is from 1748 and famous even when banned so the phrase would be common.
Very strange story.“Mrs Adams ran to The Butts field where her husband, bricklayer[3] George Adams, was playing cricket”… interesting.
It’s good to know what fanny can mean and it brings new meaning to Fanny Mae chocolate.
It’s actually ‘bum bag’.
Damn it, you sniped me. I never thought about the pun in Latin, probably because I didn’t know Latin when I read the little book, but I remember lividly the various descriptions of penetration in there.
Why don’t “we” call a dick a “stretcher” anymore? And when did such a term begin to be used for a litter whose purpose is the carrying of the impotent?
ETA “bum bag.” Hilarious. Also, kind of gross.
I think that might be even funnier!
There’s an 1835-40 cite in British English for fanny which is absolutely the genitalia.
It was a music hall song.
Jon Lighter, who edited and wrote the classic work Random House Dictionary of Amercan Slang also suggests that it could have derived from the Fanny Hill novel as harpo suggested upthread.
The US sense is found around WWI. While that suggests to me that they got it from the English during the war, how it came to be the buttocks in US slang isn’t clear.
Petanque is a French game, similar to Italian Bocce. Regarding fanny:
Pictures of same:
http://www.simplytreasures.com/t-la_fanny.aspx
http://petanque.org/pictures/306.shtml
http://users.adam.com.au/beaumont/pholics/files/fannypics.htm
Please note that these are French in origin, as is the game, and clearly owes nothing to American usage of the word.
Noel Coward evidently used “fanny” to mean “rear end” in his play Private Lives, so the use isn’t alien in the UK.
I’d love to see citations for “fanny” for both “rear end” and “genitals”, and see how far back they go. Eric Partridge also suggested Cleland’s book as an origin for the use of the term for the genitals, but is the term of such relatively recent origin? (Yes, I know how old “Fanny Hil” is. I’ve read it.)
This is interesting:
But I’d trust the other OED more. I don’t know where the Online Etymology Dictionary gets their references from. And how old the the Petanque use of the term?
Question for UK and such countries: would a child get in trouble for saying “fanny” the way a child in the US would get for saying, say, “cunt” or something? Or is it not that bad?
List of print sources for Etymonline.com. They’re pretty good. If you’re not using the 3rd online edition of the Oxford then they’re definitely better.
I’ve done this in my post up thread.
the specific earliest US usage is
From 1919.
It’s not rude per se, just the subject matter that is ‘tittilating’. It’s a juvenile word, the kind that one would expect a child to use, and that parents of a female child might give her to use refer to her genitals.
It wasn’t clear in the post that those were the earliest uses. Where are the cited from?