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A Notary admits – What do I know? Sweet F A!
Well, I thought I did. Sweet F A. It means “Nothing”, doesn’t it. A more polite way of saying Sweet F*** A**. (In a blog, Bowdlerisation* is key for those who wish WordPress to Publish).
And in turn, Sweet F*** A** means – Nothing, Nothing at all. As in, “I worked all night to please the Boss, but in the end he took all the credit and I got Sweet FA.”
I expect you are all ahead of me, but I have got to my respectable age in ignorance of the root of the expression so I thought I might share my findings. (Feel free to read something else).
It turns out that the expression was coined by sailors in the mid 19th Century when tinned food was first introduced to navy rations. Specifically tinned Meat.
On a late-night trawl through the City after a night out, for some of us a kebab which would have been repulsive in the daytime becomes an irresistible midnight treat. Just give me that mystery- meat. With tzatziki or hummus, chillies peanut sauce or teriyaki. Load it up and don’t regret it till morning.
Same idea with the sailors. When you are in need of food after exhausting work up and down the rigging, who cares what’s in the tin. It’s meat. I think? Any idea? What was it when it was alive? Cow, Lamb, Pig, Horse, Dog? Little Girl?
It’s Sweet Fanny Adams. Gallows humour is big in the armed forces. It still is, on the principle that what you can’t do anything about you may as well laugh at.
Sweet Fanny Adams, all chopped up and put in a can.
Who was Fanny? Horribly enough, she was an eight-year-old child murdered in 1867 in a peaceful village on a hot day in August. Her head was cut off and impaled on a stick in a field.
We know it was a hot summer day because her murderer, Frederick Baker wrote his diary that evening. He wrote “Killed a young girl. It was fine and hot”.
Can I just say, as a Notary, that “”Killed a young girl” is a phrase and not a sentence. Grammar and indeed punctuation can be everything. “I have eaten Grandma” – means, I am a Cannibal. “I have eaten, Grandma” – means, I don’t need anything to eat thanks Granny.
The Defence at Baker’s trial pleaded that the entry “Killed a young girl” simply lacked a comma, and that “”Killed, a young girl” was merely a record of what had happened in the village that day. As in a headline “Storms in UK, Killed, five people”.
Not that the intended meaning of the phrase would have concerned the jury overmuch, given the bloodstains on Baker’s clothes.
The success of his defence can be judged by the fact that Baker was hanged later that year. A pleasant Christmas Eve out for the crowd of thousands.
This is a link – Here is a link – to the somewhat niche website “British executions” showing detail of the murder and with photos of Fanny, her gravestone, and her two young friends from the village standing by it.
Executions were a big draw in England in the 19th Century. Here is a link to a broadsheet published after the Execution – Here is a Link – . Interesting to me to note that the awful artwork is just as bad as we get these days. – One image of a swinging bloke with a bag over his head, and another of a chap with face like no-one ever had ever.
From the same website, – here is a link – the report of the execution of William Corder who murdered poor Maria Marten. The Murder in the Red Barn, remember?
If you have nothing better to do, the whole website is a fascinating glimpse of a vanished England, when a woman could be murdered because her landlord found out that she had saved up a Guinea (One pound five pence) -here is the link – and five men could be hanged together because they were burglars who had taken 2 watches and some sewing-silk.-Link here –
Contrast and compare with today – apparently the police are being told that they have a better chance of catching burglars if they, you know, GO AND HAVE A LOOK. -Link –
What are the chances of even catching a burglar these days, let alone hanging one? Sweet FA, if you ask me.
Two versions of the same song here – First the Traditional Ballad with, unusually in Folk Music, a happy ending – The Hangman Song- and then we have the darker – Led Zeppelin version. –
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- * In the 18th Century Bowdler wrote, amongst others, “The Family Shakspeare, in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family in 10 volumes”.
- To Bowdlerise is most often considered these days to be to exhibit an unnecessarily prudish preoccupation with cutting out the “dirty bits”. I was surprised to read in Wiki that no less a literary figure than Swinburne wrote “More nauseous and more foolish cant was never chattered than that which would deride the memory or depreciate (now, deprecate I think) the merits of Bowdler. No man ever did better service to Shakespeare than the man who made it possible to put him into the hands of intelligent and imaginative children.”
- So there.
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