Disturbing Etymologies

I’ve been re-reading Terry Pratchett’s Jingo, recently. At one point, a Klatchian prince is given an honorary degree from Unseen University, a Doctorum Adamus cum Flabello Dulci, which he translates as “Doctor of Sweet Fanny Adams,” a slightly more obscure form of jingoism than that of the people shouting “towelhead” at him in the streets or assuming he’s going to attempt to buy their wives.

But last time I read this, it made me realise that I didn’t know the origin of the term “sweet Fanny Adams.” I knew that when people say “sweet F.A.” these days, they don’t usually mean Fanny Adams, but I didn’t know where the phrase had originated.

So I looked it up, in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, of course, and found one of the most disturbing etymologies I’ve ever come across.

In 1867, a young girl called Fanny Adams was assaulted, murdered, and dismembered in a hop garden in Hampshire. Someone was tried and hanged for the murder, a twenty-one-year-old solicitor’s clerk.

So far, fairly nasty. But then the Royal Navy adopted the term “sweet Fanny Adams” as a synonym for tinned mutton, with what Brewer’s describes as “grim humour.” (Do you think so, Brewer’s? I’m partial to black comedies myself, but that’s a little grim even for me.) It came to mean something worthless and then to mean “nothing at all.”

It’s worth repeating: that’s one of the most disturbing etymologies I’ve ever come across, including Elliot Engel’s argument about the origins of the phrase “break a leg.”

Brewer’s does note, though, that “F.A.” is now frequently assumed to expand into the kind of phrase that you wouldn’t use in front of your mother. But while the “four-letter words” aren’t often used in what is still known as polite society—fascinatingly, Brewer’s notes under “Four-letter Words” that the Oxford English Dictionary didn’t admit the two most objectionable of these words into their pages until 1972—they’re still preferable to the actual origins of “sweet Fanny Adams.”