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The original Fanny Adams was an eight-year-old girl in Alton, Hampshire, whose dismembered body was discovered in 1867. About the same time, tinned mutton was first introduced in the Royal Navy, and the sailors — not noted for their sensitivity — took to calling the (rather disgusting) meat “Sweet Fanny Adams”. Hence the term came to mean something worthless, and finally to mean “nothing at all”.

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