"Fanny" in US English

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>"Fanny" was mild, "backside" was not.

I don't know that there's much evidence for or against this assertion, if
it's applied to 1919. Anyway I didn't mean that the 1919 narrator was
unwilling to call his backside "backside", I meant that he seemed unwilling
to speak of it with any name at all ... including "fanny". Of course my
interpretation is only tentative.

>.... Any printed reference to the human rump before the '20s was
>customarily toned way down.

That's right AFAIK. Review of the pre-1930 newspapers shows little-to-no
evidence of "backside", [human] "rump", [one's] "behind", etc. "Buttocks"
was used when necessary, it seems to me. "Fanny" was not.

I think many people even recently -- many more back then -- were reluctant
to mention the human buttocks at all ... aside from the question of word
choice. It seems from internal evidence that the 1919 narrator was such a
person. The fact that he then used the word "fanny" is a little odd, and
suggests to me that HE did not recognize it as meaning
arse/buttocks/backside/whatever. It still may have had that meaning to
others, and in fact I would speculate that it did. But it cannot be
decisively proven from the citation IMHO, nor is it suggested by earlier
independent examples, and reasoning backward from later usage demands
considerable caution IMHO.

>"Fanny" has never been an English-language synonym for "person."

I don't know that anybody ever suggested such a possibility at all.

>Nor does the 1919 context support the interpretation "variety of sports
>fan" or "member of the British First Aid Nursing Yeomanry."

No, but my point is that there are other words "fanny" which are not
trivially obvious to everyone but which (unlike the "fanny" meaning
"buttocks") are _known to have existed pre-1919_.

Again I think caution is required for earliest-citations especially.
Suppose the name of the game in the 1919 quotation had been "bat the nancy"
or "bat the annie" instead of "bat the fanny": would it be obvious from the
quotation that "nancy" or "annie" must have meant "buttocks" rather than,
say, "new recruit" or maybe "sissy"?

Suppose one were to find an item from 1935 stating that the ritual in which
the new fraternity pledges were spanked [on the buttocks] was called "Whack
the Mole". Would it be obvious that "mole" must have meant "buttocks" here,
or might it be that the pledges were called "moles", or might it be neither
(e.g., with "mole" referring to an animal and the whole expression taken
from some different context)? In order to answer the question decisively
one would look for comparable independent uses of "mole" pre-1935 or at
worst very shortly afterward ... IMHO.

-- Doug Wilson


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