From: benlizro@ihug.co.nz   
      
   English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright.   
   Crystal could have discussed the semantic shift whereby "Fanny", the   
   familiar form of the female name "Frances", apparently became a slang   
   term for the female pudenda (BrEng, 19th century) or the buttocks   
   (USEng, 20th century).   
   But he doesn't.   
      
   Her father, Charles Burney, was a leading English musical authority of   
   his day. Her brother James went to sea and sailed with Cook on the   
   second and third voyages. He heard Tongans singing in parts   
   (polyphonically); his father refused to believe him. The prevailing view   
   was that the Ancient Greeks had only monophonic music, so polyphony must   
   have been a later European invention. (Or so I've been told.)   
      
   As for Frances herself:   
      
   "At the age of eight, [she] had yet to learn the alphabet; some scholars   
   suggest she had a form of dyslexia. By the age of ten, however, she had   
   begun to write for her own amusement."   
      
   She was sometimes referred to by her contemporaries as "Madame   
   d'Arblay", having married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay, in   
   1793.   
      
   I read a selection from her diaries and letters a few years ago, and the   
   part that stuck in my mind was an absolutely harrowing account of her   
   experience of a mastectomy, performed by a team of French surgeons, in   
   1811, with (I think) one glass of wine as anaesthetic. "It is impossible   
   to know today whether the breast removed was indeed cancerous." At any   
   rate, she survived and lived for nearly 30 years afterwards.   
      
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Burney   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)