"Fanny" in US English

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:21 AM -0800 2/9/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Probably illusion. Plenty of repsectable women were still being
>named or nicknamed "Fanny" long after Fanny Hill.
>
>   Keats's friend, Fanny Brawne, comes immediately to mind.
>

Right, but the same could be said for such names as "Peter Allcock"
with which Victorian umliterature was replete, or "Dick" in current
usage.  I'm not alleging a strong enough connection to prompt taboo
avoidance, just enough to raise a knowing eyebrow under the
appropriate conditions.  If there's no evidence that Fanny had the
same sort of double-entendu distribution in the 18th century that
Peter and Dick do now, I'll concede the point, but the lack of taboo
avoidance effects isn't sufficient in itself.

LH

>Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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>Sender: American Dialect Society
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>Subject: Re: "Fanny" in US English
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>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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