"Fanny" in US English

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sat Feb 10 20:32:14 UTC 2007


At 3:10 PM -0500 2/10/07, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>
>
>>"Fanny" has never been an English-language synonym for "person."
>
>I don't know that anybody ever suggested such a possibility at all.
>
Maybe not.  But I can imagine someone looking back on this era with
its various references in the sports pages and on sports radio to a
team's motivation for signing a player being "to put fannies in the
seats" and drawing that conclusion.  (Or the one that came up earlier
in Doug's reference to the 1900-10 reference to "fans and fannies".)

LH

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