Fanny

A number of slang and underground terms relating to sexual matters are ambiguous, or have had unstable meanings in their semantic histories, among them bugger, frig, merkin, prat, punk , and tail . However, fanny is the most prominent example of a common word having quite different meanings in different speech communities. In British English it refers to the female genitalia, while in American English it denotes a woman’s buttocks.

Historically the term is quite recent, its first appearance in a reference work being in Farmer and Henley (1890–1904), where it is defined as “the female pudendum .” As one would expect, the usage was already thriving in underworld argot, and is recorded in George Speaight’s collection, Bawdy Songs of the Early Music Hall (1835–1840): “I’ve got a little Fanny, / That with hair is overspread” (l. 76). Other nineteenth-century variants were fanny-fair and fanny-artful . Its origins are problematic, though the name Fanny is commonly claimed as the source. Although not recorded in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), the meaning is surely implied in the title of John Cleland’s revised pornographic novel Fanny Hill (1750), a punning reference to Latin mons veneris . This allusion is suggested as a possible etymological source in Random House (1994). The sense was not recorded in the original Oxford English Dictionary , nor, strangely, in the Supplement (1972–1986). Jane Mills observes in her study Womanwords: “Fanny is one of the least objectionable UK euphemisms today for cunt; it is so mild that many young British girls, if they use any name at all for their genitalia, they are encouraged to use it” (1989, 78). Up to about World War I, Fanny was a fashionable girl’s name in Britain, but the genital sense has ended its appeal, although in France it remains common.

The American sense dates from the 1920s, according to both the OED and Random House . The semantic distinction between the two speech communities is not absolute, however. In Private Lives (1930), by the English author Noel Coward, a character says: “You’d fallen on your fanny a few moments before” (Act I). Clearly in this context the American sense is the more plausible anatomically. Similarly, the English dramatist Terence Rattigan’s play French Without Tears (1937) carries the ironic comment “Progress. Progress my fanny” (II i 44), clearly the equivalent of “Progress my arse!” The “English” sense is recorded from 1879 but is also found in American usage, although instances are rare. In other global varieties the English sense tends to predominate, but the term is not commonly used.