To just call a fanny a fanny?

[teafortoads]

Apologies if this has been done before/to death but i am new to this Mumsnet Lark (posting not lurking, I have happily lurked for years). What on earth word do you give to your toddler to describe their girl parts? I have and always will, have a fanny, where as I am aware of friends who have foofs, fairies (could cause some confusion when you go to put the fairy on top of the Christmas tree) lady gardens vulvas and so on. I see no reason to pretty things up, and always arrive back at good old trusty fanny in the end having massively overthunk things. When DD2 is a little bit older I will furnish her with all the proper words, but are fanny and willie (not that she will encounter any of THOSE until she is at least 40 given that I am a single Mum and our house is happily a man free zone nowadays, and boyfriends will not be permitted until she is at least 40) acceptable? Is fanny a bit coarse?

To the majority of the population 'knackered' does just mean very tired. I won't stop using that for fear of offending some weirdos who've decided it has a sexual meaning.

Noony in our house. I think it's pretty prevailant in Essex. Dsis calls hers her Twinkle. She's 32!

Yeah we call it vulva because my DH grew up with an abusive paedophile stepdaughter (now in prison) and was freaked out, to put it mildly, about raising children who would be prepared in the best possible way to avoid the same fate. As one of the child protection tips is to call a spade a spade, it's what we've done. In the end tho, I suppose as long as your DD's know it's their private place and it's different from their bottom, and we are raising confident girls, we are all doing a good job. On a slightly separate note, I referred to vagina when my DD asked me about babies and periods. She's only 3 so wasn't a hugely long convo, just anatomically correct.

en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:knackered

Shows my age!

It's so strange that the female anatomy is referred to as so many words not wanting to upset anyone but a boy's anatomy is a willy and that's ok.

Quite.

'Willy' is fine but everyone gets in a hoo-ha (hoo-ha is probably a fanny euphemism too no doubt!) over 'fanny'.

I remember in the 80's my mum saying I shouldn't use the word "knackered" as it was rude.

I didn't use it again until I was an adult and found out what she thought it meant. By that time I think everyone had forgotten it was ever meant to mean "sexually tired" and probably not all that often either.

I quite like vagine said in a Borat voice.

Loving this thread. Until I started looking at MN I had never heard the word foof. Today I have learnt a new one beef curtains both of which have made me howl with laughter. Where I come from in Wales I have heard people referring to their fanny as their vjojo.

In our house we use mini not sure why but again this causes many giggles and euphemism from DH as I also drive a mini. So for example DH will say something like you need to wash your mini as its dirty. Hopefully he is referring to the car .

TBH I wouldn't be happy if dd referred to her bits as fanny as it does sound a bit crude

knacker (v.)
"to kill, castrate" (1855), apparently from knacker (n.) "one who slaughters old or sick horses" (1812). This is probably the same word as the earlier knacker/nacker "harness-maker" (1570s), which survived in 18c. in dialects. The sense extension is perhaps because knackers supplied farmers general help with horse matters, including disposing of dead ones. The word is of uncertain origin, possibly from a dialectal survival of a Scandinavian word represented by Old Norse hnakkur "saddle," related to hnakki "back of the neck," and thus possibly related to neck (n.). Most often used in weakened sense of "to tire out" (1883) and usually encountered in its past tense

It may well have been used in a sexual context in some places in the 1970s and 1980s but it's generally been used to mean tired and broken.

Fanny seems to be quite divisive! We were taught to say willy and fanny by Extremely Proper and Respectable Scottish Mother (I add the Scottish part as fanny seems to be frowned upon most in Scotland), not that we were allowed to speak about these things publically or in fact at home, (though obviously DS and i loved all the rude words, inventing our own, for example 'egg-hole' for vagina. Eek.) and i wouldn't be too pleased to find out DD had been town criering about her parts round the playground regardless of what name they go by! Vulva just conjures up our old sturdy yet trusty Volo, so a bit of a no no and Minnie is a reasonably popular girls name round these here parts.

Flangelina Ballerina?

'Wee Door' according to my 20 month old

Is that a wee door or a wee door First? It works either way.

This is problem that will go on for ever, probably.
We have 3 children and 4 grandchildren so there are several terms we have encountered over the years :
The penis was usually a "willie", but the vagina was always a " woo-woo " - I have no idea where that originated but the term has been used by at 4 generations of females in our family. My mother-in-law (b. 1923 ) used it and now our youngest grand-daughter ( b. 2013 ) uses it.
Also in use for the penis is /was " todger ".
These are the more polite terms of course. We never used the term " fanny " or others such as " minge " - at least not in front of children ! There are loads of vulgar terms for both male and female organs as I'm sure everyone knows. I recall once, when I was working in sales, hearing a female colleague say to her friends that she " just off to point Alice at the Armitage " which is obviously the female equivalent of
a man " pointing Percy at the Porcelain ".
Incidentally, does anyone fancy living in " Twatt " ? This is an actual village in the Orkney Islands. I wonder what the natives call themselves ?

Oh thanks a lot for this thread! I was tempted to start it myself for ages..however never did;) I was always wondering how to call girls parts in a bit softer way than just vagina... as it is for willie for example. The thing is I'm not English, i was asking my friends who are, and nobody NOBODY knew :)
so very useful :)) To be honest I really like fanny ;) it sounds light:)) but thats maybe i dont feel the weight of the language (my husband constantly telling me not to use certain words because they horribly vulgar/offensive/notpolite/etc ;)))

Ours is Minnie hear. Much nicer and rhymes with Willie (as DS Pointed out this am)

Yup girls have 'Minnie's' boys have 'Willy's' and for some reason we called boobs 'Charlie's' when I was little...

When I was a child my best friend and her mum called it fanny so naturally I went home and said it to my mother. She hit the roof! Said I was never to call it that again. She really loathes the word for some reason, seems to find it rude and offensive . I don't particularly like it, it sounds a bit harsh. But it's not offensive.

It was twinkle when I was a kid. My DC call it foo foo so the story "little rabbit foo foo" is particularly amusing . Penis is widger, my mum calls it a todger.

The "knackered" discussion reminds me of a lad on my English class many years ago. We had English first thing on Momdays. This lad was a bit late one day and apologised to the teacher "Sorry I'm late Sir, I was knackered, could n't get out of bed". Teacher replied "'Knackered' means sexually exhausted X, I think you mean you were very tired" (cue snigers from 25 fourteen year olds) "Yes Sir, I did".

A couple of weeks later X was late again:
X - "Sorry Sir, I was knackered"
Teacher -"We've talked about this..."
X - "This time I really was knackered Sir".

Doesn't Minnie cause problems though as its not phonetically distinct from mini? My neighbour has a lovely mini. It's red and it's looks very comfortable but I've never been in it.

On a similar note, my sister used 'bits and pieces' as her word for genitals when her children were small. My grandmother uses bits and pieces as a description for underwear. When we were all on holiday together my grandmother suggested, in front of the children, that I should give my bits and pieces to my sister to wash. Cue much laughter!

fanny is very divisive isn't it? Knackered was a bad word growing up in Essex in the 70's/80's.

It was always Minnie for a girl & Steven and the twins for a boy

Twinkle was the name of a girls magazine when I was child.

My DD (4yo) uses 'bottom' for anything general, so she would say 'I fell down and hurt my bottom' regardless of which specific bit she landed on, but would likely use 'wee hole', 'vagina' or 'poo hole' if she had to be more specific.

we used to call it either a "woo woo" ( from the film High Anxiety) or a 'fairy' as my Ma called it before me etc etc

still a fairy now- dd is nearly 14 and I am 52! My dear old Aunt Nellie used to refer to it as 'yer doing-ses'

Penis
Vulva/Vagina

The girls sometimes call it their Gina though.

Hate the word fanny and front bottom. It is not a front bottom, it's a bloody vulva/vagina, not a bum stuck on the front

As a child my mum used willy and winky.