It’s not a good look to be fawning over somebody. Fawning is “courting favor by an abject demeanor.” It can also mean to cringe, as if you’re sure you’re about to be beaten, or insulted, or otherwise ill-used by somebody that you can’t or won’t fight back against. In fiction, it’s usually the bad guy’s sidekicks and toadies who go around fawning.
“Fawn” comes from the Old English word “fain,” which meant to be glad or to rejoice. It seems to be based on the idea that the fawner is faking gladness about even being close to or being able to serve the, well, the “fawnee.”
The word is also applied to animal behavior; a dog who’s delighted to see his master also “fawns” by means of tail wagging, whining, and generally getting underfoot. From that meaning, “fawn” came to be used in the 1400s to mean patting dogs on the head or generally paying attention to them.
You might think that this also led to the use of “fawn” to mean a young deer, or (at one time) any young animal, but that’s not the way it went. The “fawn” that means a young animal is a different word, derived from the Old French word “faon,” which meant offspring. And it’s this version of “fawn” that means giving birth. It originally meant any birth, but nowadays both the young animal “fawn” and the giving birth “fawn” are used only in relation to deer. In 1481 you could get away with this: “They [lionesses] come to fede their fawnes the iii day after they haue fawned,” but by 1679 the deer had won out: “Because the Dear did then fawn, or bring forth their young.”
The other usage of “fawn,” to mean a light brown color, also comes from deer. It’s the color of a young deer — at least most of them. It would seem like a fawn might be expected to do some fawning around mama deer, but nobody seems to have ever made that connection. Or maybe some writers have tried it, showed their work to their spouses, and went back for a rewrite after hearing something like “dear, dear, deer fawns don’t fawn, dear.”
