"Fanny" in US English

[Wilson Gray]

FWIW, my mother, b.1914 in Longview, TX, used "fan your fanny" as a
joking replacement for "give you a spanking." When she wasn't joking,
she  straightforwardly stated,  "I'm going to beat you till I can't
see you!"

Those were the good old days! :--(

-Wilson

On 2/10/07, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Fanny" in US English
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 3:10 PM -0500 2/10/07, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
> >
> >
> >>"Fanny" has never been an English-language synonym for "person."
> >
> >I don't know that anybody ever suggested such a possibility at all.
> >
> Maybe not.  But I can imagine someone looking back on this era with
> its various references in the sports pages and on sports radio to a
> team's motivation for signing a player being "to put fannies in the
> seats" and drawing that conclusion.  (Or the one that came up earlier
> in Doug's reference to the 1900-10 reference to "fans and fannies".)
>
> LH
>
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-Sam'l Clemens

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