fanny

The name Fanny is a diminutive of Frances, itself the feminine form of Francis, which traces to Medieval Latin 'Franciscus,' meaning 'a Frank.' The Franks were a Germanic people who gave their name to France, and the name Francis honored Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone in 1181 and renamed for his father's deep affinity for France and French culture. By the sixteenth century, Frances was a common English given name, and Fanny had settled as its affectionate short form. Jane Austen used it without any embarrassment for the heroine of Mansfield Park in 1814, the timid Fanny Price.

In 1748, the London bookseller Ralph Griffiths published Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, written by John Cleland while imprisoned for debt. The novel's narrator and protagonist is Fanny Hill, and the book's explicit content made it immediately notorious, immediately suppressed, and immediately reprinted. Whether the British slang term derived directly from Cleland's character or merely arrived contemporaneously is uncertain, but the earliest recorded use of 'fanny' as a vulgar term for female anatomy dates to 1879 in John Stephen Farmer's slang dictionary, with clear implication that the usage was already established.

American English took the name and ran in a different direction. By 1920, 'fanny' appeared in American slang to mean the buttocks, a usage entirely distinct from the British one. The path from the British to the American sense may have run through euphemism: the buttocks are, anatomically speaking, adjacent to the original referent, and American borrowers may have softened the word for general use. 'Fanny pack,' the small belt pouch popularized in the 1980s, carries the American meaning with complete innocence, though it causes consistent embarrassment in British contexts.

The divergence of 'fanny' illustrates how English, planted on two continents, grew differently from the same seed. British English preserved the older, more explicit sense; American English developed a milder anatomical meaning that spread to Australia and Canada. The name Fanny fell sharply out of fashion in the twentieth century because of these associations, though it saw a small nostalgic revival in the 2010s. What began as a term of endearment for Frances became, through one scandalous novel and the natural drift of slang, a word that means different things depending on which side of the Atlantic you are standing.