"Fanny" in US English

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:09 PM -0800 2/8/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>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.

I wonder who else (besides me) only became of aware of this sense of
"fanny" in Br. Eng. upon being clued in to the allusion contained in
the title of the 18th century erotoclassic, _Fanny Hill, or the
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure_, that served as a valuable primer for
some of us in the 1960s.  Now if it's true that this is only cited
from 1840, was this a illusion rather than an allusion?

LH

>   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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