Do you think Enid Blyton was messing with us when she named Dick and Aunt Fanny?

[peterprefectartar]

It's understandable for Fanny to be used in America where it doesn't have that naughty meaning, but British Enid knew perfectly well what it means.

"I say, Fanny!" Exclaimed Uncle Quentin. "I smell the most delicious fish, gosh I simply can't wait to gobble up some fish tonight". "No dearest", replied Aunt Fanny. "That's my fanny. We can't afford to buy food because we spent all our money on a bloody island."

"But everytime I walk past Dick I swear I can smell cheese, wait, oh dear...", replied Quentin in shock.

Excerpt from one of Blyton's novels that didn't make it to print.

 

[POWER IN MISERY]

what?

 

[Dysnomia]

It's understandable for Fanny to be used in America where it doesn't have that naughty meaning

It's a butt in 'Murrica. But it's an archaic use. I haven't heard anyone under 80 use it. Like pram for a baby stroller. My grandmother would sometimes say pram. But she was born in the 20s. We actually did have a antique doll pram here at some point. I think it belonged to my aunt who was born in 1934. I wonder what happened to it. I used to play with it when I was very young. Bet it would be worth a nice amount now. It was in very good shape even though my grandmother used to put my aunt's dolls in it then push it down the hill.

Anyway, I don't know what the thread is about exactly. But there's no way those names were used by accident.

 

[peterprefectartar]

Her Famous Five novels, I'm not sure how popular they became in the US, they couldn't be more British if they tried.

Fanny is occasionally used over here, both as "vagina" and as a generic insult eg "you fanny!"

 

[Less Nasty Old Person]

Enid Blyton was impossibly prolific. She managed to make a career of grinding out hundreds of children's books that were basically garbage. Asimov wrote hundreds of books too including kid books, but his were great. Stephen King's only saving grace is that he doesn't write kidlit.

I reread one Blyton series last year when Amazon released it on Kindle. The stories are appallingly cringy and tone-deaf, even for their time. The writing is joylessly slapdash. Plots and story lines are clumsy. Which can only mean nobody in the kidlit world took good writing seriously at the time because kids are too dumb to know any better, right?

Kid books were a whole other thing in my era (early 60s). I hated Curious George and have always feared sock monkeys as a result. Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories were in every doctor's waiting room and were depressingly moralistic and didactic about not breaking windows with your cricket ball or riding your bike across wet concrete for fear of being yelled at by God which turned me atheist. Nancy Drew was tolerable but unrelatable because nobody I knew had their own "roadster" -- if we were lucky we had second hand bikes. Mysteries are harder for a girl detective to solve if you have to take the bus to go anywhere.

The science books at the library were not too bad and the juvie Heinlein books were awesome, as were the horse stories by Walter Farley et al. That was about it, so when my friends all turned boy crazy and outgrew me I read my cousin's old obstetrics textbooks from nursing school and became child-free because I wanted nothing to do with the miracle of childbirth. (I just now realized that I was such a fucking puzzle piece as a kid no wonder nobody could stand me.)

As a kid I slogged through a few of what would now be categorized as middle grade Blyton series because the neighbor had a ton of them. They were not particularly engaging except for when one of the characters got to bring her horse to boarding school. One character who everyone hated and bullied had the same name as me which I took personally -- why couldn't the unpopular girl be named Mildred or Hortense or even Enid? Fuck.

Noddy and Golliwog turned my stomach as a kid. I couldn't imagine any kid reading those unless forced to by grownups.