View Message

This is a reply within a larger thread: view the whole thread

Re: Fannie and Fanny
in reply to a message by MJ
Um...'fanny' here in England is a slang term for what is also called a girl's 'front bottom' or in less coy terms, vagina. How it got moved to the back bottom over there I don't know LOL Here it was a 19th Century coined term but the exact origin/association is unknown. I would imagine it was here in the 1800's and probably got shared amongst the international Allied troops of WWI so that by the mid 1920's it would be introduced on the American scene. It would probably be well-established by the 1930's and on the wane, dying out by the 1940's.I imagine the move from vagina to buttock was one of simple misunderstanding. Sort of like Squaw - it actually means 'penis' but white misunderstanding means that people routinely make the mistake of calling me a 'squaw' when I'm just a mixed-blood Native American woman and like women everywhere, completely lack that appendage ;o)Devon
vote up1vote down

Replies

LOL! I thought squaw meaned "Native American woman"!
Here in Sweden, Fanny is still a common name for little girls, it's not associated with bottoms or vaginas. :) I think it's a cute name, it's a pity that Fanny is a four-letter word in England and USA nowadays.
vote up1vote down
Yep, I also thought 'squaw' means Native American wife. At least that's what they say in Western comics :-) But then again, comics give such a destorted view on Native American tribes anyway; I can't believe they have survived and still get published to a wide audience in the 21st century!Fanny and Fanni have been all the rage here in Finland as well, since the early 1990s. The name became popular together with other old-fashioned, cute names such as Ida, Emma and Sofia. I believe Fanny even made it to the Top 10 at some point. By now people are getting tired of these overused names and are turning to something else instead, so the popularity of Fanny is dropping rapidly.The connection to arse or vagina is unknown of, unless you happen to be an English scholar or otherwise love leafing through dictionaries :-)
Lass
vote up1vote down
It's just considered vulgar slang, not as bad as c*nt or anything, more on the level of arse. But there's a Swedish model working here named Fanny and everyone, once they stopped twittering, thought it was sort of cute. Matter of fact, she had this sort of page-boy-over-mohawk haircut that was the rage last summer and girls were requesting 'a Fanny' LOL from their hairdressers.Devon
vote up1vote down