Talk:Glossary of British terms not widely used in the United States

Can someone verify the vulgarity of "fanny" in British English? -- Zoe

Yup. It is slang for vagina. (We always find it odd listening to the Amerian english usage. My favourite moment was in a clothes shop hearing a rather large woman in a strong very loud New York accent checking out a new skirt and innocently asking the girl with her "do you think my fanny would look big in that?" And watching probably 50 people in the large store, from the men's section to the household section to people coming down escalators in unison collapse in a fit of laughing. And the woman looking around at people laughing with tears running down their faces, asking the girl serving her (who was biting her lip to stop her laughing) "was it something I said?" The girl leaned over, whispered something, and the woman, in a Rachel from Friends-type voice, said, a whole octave lower, "Nooooo. They thought I was talking about . . . my vagina?" The moment she said that all 50 people, who had sort of recovered from the fits of laughter, were buckled up again, especially when loudly she said "they thought I was asking . . . IS MY VAGINA BIG IN THAT?. But to be fair to her, the woman immediately saw the funny side. The manager of the store gave her the skirt free, saying she had made his day, that he hadn't laughed as much in years and that he would laughing everytime he remembered it for the rest of his life. Oh. yes. Marks and Spencers. Dartford in Kent. 1989. I still remember it now! lol FearÉIREANN 04:20 17 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I have noticed that Zoe only asks for this sort of thing when her preferred default would reinforce something US-centred (see how the US-oriented let through the material I supplied for the Virgin Islands if and only if it suited their preconceptions, and denied vandalism despite previously being told that repetition of cuts without discussion would constitute vandalism and not mere disagreement - yet refused to see that that was as much driven by their own uninformed perspective as the reverse was by my informed recollections). She achieves US-oriented selective editing by imposing the requirement one way, even when the material itself demonstrates how to establish most of its own provenance through internal evidence (she and they wouldn't look).

So Zoe will want more than being told by someone with inside knowledge (she wouldn't stop vandalising even when I showed my own knowledge of the area, achieved through following the constitutional connections with the Danish Crown). For a current piece of evidence more solid than merely being there, try this, from this week's Spectator diary by Michael Vestey (at [1]):-

"...I was discussing with a friend this week the problem of remembering the Christian names of people one hasn’t seen for some time, and was reminded of a social gaffe I committed some years ago. Bumping into a former flatmate and his wife in a London theatre bar, I struggled to recall her name so that I could introduce her to my then wife. An association began to form in my mind and I heard myself saying, ‘And this is Fanny.’ The woman stared at me and said, ‘Pussy. He calls me Pussy.’ ‘Ah,’ I replied in confusion, ‘I knew it was something of the sort,’ which, of course, only compounded the offence."

I trust this is evidence solid enough for Zoe, considering that not only is there a link but also the hard copy magazine is available if she cares to find one. PML.