"Fanny" in US English

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Fanny" was mild, "backside" was not. This is entirely consistent with my own experience of the pre- "They-even-say-'ass'-on-TV" era.  Any printed reference to the human rump before the '20s was customarily toned way down.

  "Fanny" has never been an English-language synonym for "person." Nor does the 1919 context support the interpretation "variety of sports fan" or "member of the British First Aid Nursing Yeomanry."

  Occam rather than Hume provides the more practical guidance for lexicographers.


  JL



"Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET> wrote:
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Poster: "Douglas G. Wilson"
Subject: Re: "Fanny" in US English
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> Does anyone know of any more pre-1926 U.S. exx. ?

I don't. But I'll look around.

I wonder whether the first (1919) HDAS citation in sense 2 is really
certain to exemplify "fanny" = "backside".

It says <strap -- I believe they call the game "Bat the Fanny" and they sure did bat
me.>> The narrator is unwilling to name what I think is his backside; then
is it natural for him to name it a few words later? Also: it reads "...
they sure did bat me", not "... they sure did bat mine", *suggesting* that
the narrator *may* have taken "fanny" to refer to a person rather than a
body part. Anyway, to me it looks as though the narrator did not himself
recognize "fanny" as meaning "backside". Although I don't deny the
possibility of "fanny" basically meaning "backside" here, I think there are
other possibilities. We do not have any information about the origin of the
game or why it was so named, do we? We don't have any independent evidence
that "fanny" was used like this for "backside" in 1919, do we?

Two candidates for "fanny" as a person (probably there are others):

(1) In WW I, there was a British nursing auxiliary corps called the First
Aid Nursing Yeomanry; the women of this organization were called FANYs or
Fannies, it seems.

(2) In US newspapers between 1900 and 1910 I find a few instances of the
collocation "fans and fannies" apparently referring to sports fans. I don't
know what "fanny"/"fannie" means here (if anything), maybe "child fan",
maybe "female fan", maybe "less devoted fan"? Maybe one of the baseball
slang experts has some notion.

-- Doug Wilson


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