"Fanny" in US English

[Jonathan Lighter]

HDAS has a British cite for _fanny_, "female pudenda" from 1840 or a little earlier.  I don't know what the story is in Canada, but U.S. exx. of this sense, long a cliche' in England, are virtually nonexistent.

  One might speculate that the shift from pudenda to buttocks (of either sex) may have owed something to homosexual usage. There is inconclusive evidence to support this idea.

  Too late for inclusion in HDAS 1, Jesse discovered a unique British ex. of _fanny_ from 1881. The source is a very rare homosexually oriented fantasy titled _The Sins of the Cities of the Plain_.  In it, a male transvestite has occasion to say (ch. vii), "If you don't do it for me, you shall never love my little fanny again !"  That the speaker is unfortunately in drag complicates the analysis, but _fanny_ does appear in a transferred sense.

  On the other hand, "fanny" in the United States seems always to have been a mild term.  It may be significant, though, that the earliest cite in HDAS, from 1919, appeared in the informal history of a World War army unit, the 12th Infantry Regiment, which, however, did not serve overseas. That the printer even reproduced the word shows that he did not believe it was under any taboo; however, its previous history in America is unknown.

  A few years later, in 1925, John Dos Passos wrote in amazement that during discussions with Harper Bros. about the publisher's insistence upon bowdlerizing his novel, _Manhattan Transfer_, "[T]hey thought 'fanny' meant penis" (Dos Passos, _The Fourteenth Chronicle_, ed. T. Ludington [Boston: Gambit, 1973], p. 362).  This suggests that the word was still relatively new to Americans even in 1925 - and maybe that Dos Passos's editor was familiar with the prevailing British connection of the word unequivocally with sex.

  The second ex. printed in HDAS, also from 1925, is in the work of Robert McAlmon, whose fiction often included gay characters.

  The American word "fanny" was so utterly harmless by the 1950s that I had no hesitation in asking my grandmother whether this was a word she had used in her childhood.  She thought not, dating it instead (cautiously) to the 1920s.  As far as the general public is concerned, her reckoning was entirely consistent with the printed evidence.

  Does anyone know of any more pre-1926 U.S. exx. ?

  JL


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