Euphemisms and the gluteus maximus

Hyacinth was sound asleep at her post on the ottoman by the front door.  She was snoring so loudly that if you didn’t know that it was Hyacinth, you would suspect a 300-pound drunk was sleeping off a two-day bender. 

It had been a hard day.  The mailman had come and gone and so had the UPS man.  Moose had been unusually messy at dinner, which meant that floor patrol was especially arduous.  The doorbell rang four times, a record-breaking number at Maison Bean, and Hyacinth had glimpsed a very large and naked bird that would soon be cooking in the Bean oven.

“It’s a lovely dog,” Miles said.

Papa snorted and choked on his sangria.  At Maison Bean, the only person who says “lovely” is Papa, and he says it with extreme sarcasm. 

“Oh, firetrucking lovely!” he said when Moose destroyed his computer.

Miles is my friend Jolie’s 3-year-old.  Jolie is a single mother like me, except that she lives in Ireland where being a single mother by choice makes her a trailblazer because really there are no other SMCs.

Jolie and Miles along with Lillianna from Florida were visiting for Thanksgiving.  And while Jolie, Lillianna, and I are sisters in spirit, we discovered that we don’t always speak the same language.

When I told Jax to get his fanny into bed, Jolie almost had an apoplexy.

Lillianna counts among her scores of boyfriends at least one Brit.  “Bean,” she said, “in the U.K. ‘fanny’ means… the other side… on a woman.  It’s not a nice word.”

WTH?!

I didn’t believe her, so I checked it out on urbandictionary.com and learned that in the U.K., fanny is indeed a vulgar word meaning a woman’s nether regions.  I can’t publish the entire definition because this is a PG site, but I thought this was funny in an eye-rolling lovely sort of way:

The yanks have it wrong again.

Think of it this way: Americans speak English. English don’t speak American. It’s that simple really.

We are right, you are wrong.  And we’re not your cousins.

If you don’t say “fanny,” what does a little leprechaun call his gluteus maximus?

“A bum-bum,” Jolie said when I asked the question.

Mimi comes from a long line of Southern Baptists, and Papa’s great grandfather Bean was actually a Southern Baptist minister which makes the Beans a little Puritan about some things, ergo we have an interesting vocabulary.

“Fanny” became part of the Bean lexicon after much debate. “Butt” is a little too crass in Mimi’s world for little Beans.  “Derriere” is too French. “Heiney” is something that comes in a green bottle from Holland.  And “bottom” is something you hit when you’re down and out.  So “fanny” it was.  

We just didn’t know that on the other side of the pond it had a different meaning.

When she came in from her Black Friday shopping spree, Jolie was not only carrying a king’s ransom in new clothes, she was also carrying a six-pack of Budweiser.”

 “BUDWEISER?  You’re Irish, honey.  You know—the home of Guinness and Murphy’s.”

“When in Rome…”

“You’re not in Rome, Jolie.  You’re at Maison Bean, and we don’t do domestic here.”

“Really?” she said, arching an eyebrow.

Well, except maybe for the jargon. 

And the grits and boiled peanuts.