I Bet You Think You Know What ‘Sweet FA’ Means But I Bet You Don’t Know Where It Came From
There’s a tragedy and the black humor of servicemen at the heart of the story
Urban dictionary says ‘Sweet FA’ is nowadays taken to mean ‘sweet f*** all’ i.e. nothing. It is also suggests that this is an alternative way of saying ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’, which means the same thing — nothing, in other words.
‘If this deal goes through, then, what’s in it for me?”
“Sweet FA, I’m afraid. Those other two will split the profit between themselves.”
‘Sweet FA’ did come from ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’ but what most people these days don’t realize is that Fanny Adams was a real person and a tragic story.
Fanny Adams was a little girl of 8 years old when she was murdered by Fredrick Baker at Alton in Hampshire, England, not far from the home of the Royal Navy at Portsmouth.
Fanny’s murder was brutal and her body was dismembered — indeed, parts of it were never found. This coincided with the introduction of a new type of ration to the Home Fleet of the Royal Navy and a new phrase entered Naval slang in the 1860s.
Servicemen and women are often small ‘c’ conservative and resistant to change, and with some…
