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| In This Season Of Football, ... Who Has Heard of the Mosquito Bowl ? (Page 2/2) |
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maryjane
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FEB 01, 07:48 PM
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It originally was was 2 separate words, or in some instances, hyphenated. (and spelled differently at different times (tymes?)
| quote | “A tyd bit, i.e. a speciall morsell reserved to eat at last.” From A Description of the Hundred of Berkeley in the County of Gloucester and of Its Inhabitants, 1639, by the antiquarian John Smyth. (The “Hundred of Berkeley” refers to a section of the county.)
The work was later edited by John Maclean and published in 1885 as The Berkeley Manuscripts. Maclean writes in his preface that Smyth finished the work on Dec. 21, 1639.
The OED says the term showed up as “tit bit” two years later: “A Man-servant … should goe into a Victualers service, because he hopeth for tit bits either of gift, or by stealth, and relicks more ordinary of his Masters Dishes.” From A Right Intention (1641), John Dawson’s translation of a Latin treatise by Jeremias Drexel.
The term, Oxford says, soon came to be used figuratively to describe “a person or thing likened to a delicacy or morsel,” as in this 1650 citation from a London weekly overseen by John Milton: “The Kirk longs much, and is like to miscarry for a Tid Bit of yong Tarquin” (Mercurius Politicus, No. 3, June 20-27).
In this figurative sense, the term was spelled “tidbit” as well as “titbit” by British writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, as in these expanded OED examples:
“Author. Now for a taste of Recitativo. My farce is an Oglio of tid-bits,” from Eurydice, A Farce, by Henry Fielding. (The play was withdrawn after two performances in 1737 because of hissing. It was published for the first time in Miscellanies, 1743, as Eurydice, A Farce: As it was d-mned at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.)
“And except on first nights or some other such occasion, or during the singing of the well-known tit-bits of any opera, there was an amount of chattering in the house which would have made the hair of a fanatico per la musica stand on end” (What I Remember, an 1887 memoir by Thomas Adolphus Trollope |
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cliffw
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FEB 02, 11:12 AM
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| quote | Originally posted by rinselberg:
I think this insertion of a space, which separates "titbit" into "tit" and "bit", is regarded as idiosyncratic and certainly frowned upon in academic publishing houses and the like.
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How is it spelled in Latin ? Words are to advance a thought. I succeeded.
I'll leave it to you to PM Cliff Penock and tell him his spell check is wrong.
Perhaps I got it wrong. Let's try "tidbit" .
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maryjane
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FEB 02, 01:40 PM
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| quote | Originally posted by cliffw:
How is it spelled in Latin ? Words are to advance a thought. I succeeded.
I'll leave it to you to PM Cliff Penock and tell him his spell check is wrong.
Perhaps I got it wrong. Let's try "tidbit" . |
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googleopolis sez:
https://www.latin-is-simple...ocabulary/noun/6990/[This message has been edited by maryjane (edited 02-02-2023).]
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