sweet [OE] The original use of this was for the taste, the ‘dessert’ and ‘confectionery’ senses only dating from the mid 19th century. The meaning ‘fine, good’ was originally Australian, from the 1890s. The Fanny Adams in sweet Fanny Adams, ‘absolutely nothing at all’, really existed. She was the unfortunate young victim in a brutal murder of 1867, whose body was mutilated and cut up by her killer. Soon sailors in the Royal Navy were using her name, with gruesome black humour, as a slang term for an unpopular type of tinned meat or stew. The current meaning arose in the early 20th century and is sometimes shortened to sweet FA. People often translate FA here as standing for F— All, but this was not the expression’s origin. The phrase sweetness and light was first used by Jonathan Swift in The Battle of the Books (1704). Both are produced by bees: ‘Instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest things, which are sweetness and light.’ Later the phrase was taken up by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869), where he used it with aesthetic and moral reference: ‘The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.’