Was Sweet Fanny Adams a real person?

[Mayonaise.]

Yes there was a real Sweet Fanny Adams, but the connection with the expression is horrible.

Fanny Adams was a little 8 year old girl in Hampshire in England. In 1867 she was found brutally murdered in a hop field, with her body hideously dismembered and spread all over the place. The case was widel publicised and everyone knew who Sweet Fanny Adams was.

Round the same time, the navy introduced a knew kind of food on ships: tinned mutton. Rather callously, the sailors referred to this messy food as Sweet Fanny Adams because of it's similarity to unidentifiable body parts. The use of the term became quite common and eventually came to mean something worthless or, later, nothing at all.

Then, during the 20th century, military troops further corrupted the image becase is similarity with another vernacualr phrase, fuck all. There was no connection between the two expressions; they just happened to have the same initals.

[Mayonaise.]

well i thought it was interesting.