Bump for Monday.
I know when we were kids we’d say “Hard Cheese.” I know my friends in NZ say “tough chedder.” I wonder if “tough titties” could have been a way to substitute an alliteration for cheese
Grew up in Midwest & West coast in the 70s, heard “tough titty” but never any of these longer versions from both adults and peers. Seemed to mean “I hear your complaint, am not particularly sympathetic to it, and have no intention of taking any action to alleviate it”.
I must needs refute that point- you hear them all quite often at good schools- just not around adults.
The only difference between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ is that the bad kids (or at the bad schools) the behavior is visible instead of under wraps. Kids are still kids, pushing boundaries and each other verbally as well as in other ways.
The answer can be found in the definition of “tough shit” from the New Dictionary of American Slang, Edited by Robert L. Chapman, 1986, p.444:
tough shit - sentence (Variations: nibs or noogies or rocks or tiddy or titty may replace shit) That’s too bad; that’s a terrible shame - always mocking: “Tough tiddy,” the Boss said - Robert Penn Warren / Well, my friend, that’s just tough shit about your lost plane ticket / to which one has to say, with whatever empathy…tough nibs - Villace Voice / That’s tough shit, man, my heart really bleeds - WT Tyler / Well…tough titty - Armistead Maupin [most forms probably from black or Southern; the mammary forms seem based on a black folk-saying, “It’s tough titty, but the milk is good”]
I havent the answer to the OP, but I must say I did find some interesting websites when googling it :eek:
NorCal late 70’s - we’d say “tough titty said the kitty when the milk ran dry.” Don’t know where I picked it up from though.
<side note> first curse word I heard on a playground was ‘bastard.’ I got home that day and started calling my dad a bastard. He ignored it a few times then finally sat me down and asked me if I knew what that meant. When I said no he explained it to me. I ran new words through the neighbor kid after that. </sn>
I have nothing to add except that I heard “tough titty said the kitty…something I no longer remember” a lot in the 70’s and 80’s in Missouri.
I like the farm connection, with the phrase maybe making the leap to more general use when American farm kids and city kids shared slang in WWI. But I base that on absolutely no evidence.
I haven’t found a cite yet to give this version any more credibiliity …
"One bright day, in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight
And the narrator, with his story untold,
Meekly whispered, loud and bold,
The beginning words, to the meeting’s end,
You, my enemy, are now my friend,
Oh, now I see said the blind man, to the deaf mute.
As he picked up a hammer and saw
He called his wife on the disconnected telephone to see if it was raining
(They lived on the corner, in the middle of the block,
On the second floor of a vacant lot.)
She stuck her wooden arm through the knot hole in the brick wall"
The rhyming is lost in the last stanza so I’m not sure this is at all accurate, but at least it’s longer.
The rhyme I heard as a kid (Southern Illinois, late 70s):
"One morning in the middle of the night
Two dead boys got up to fight.
Back-to-back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other.
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
Came and shot the two dead boys.
If you don’t believe this lie is true,
Ask the blind man-- he saw it, too."
I haven’t thought about this in years. It sounds like it might be a lot older than 30 years, though.
That’s basically the Two Dead Boys version I know, thetruewheel.
My dad liked to sing this song:
Sweet Rosie O’Grady,
She was a blacksmith by birth.
But Rosie got tired of living,
And wanted to leave this earth.
So she swallowed a tape-line,
But dying by inches was hard.
So Rosie went out in the alley,
Laid down and died by the yard.
I wonder how old that is?
Old Folklore
One fine day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys* got up to fight, [*or men]
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other,
One was blind and the other couldn’t, see
So they chose a dummy for a referee.
A blind man went to see fair play,
A dumb man went to shout “hooray!”
A paralysed donkey passing by,
Kicked the blind man in the eye,
Knocked him through a nine inch wall,
Into a dry ditch and drowned them all,
A deaf policeman heard the noise,
And came to arrest the two dead boys,
If you don’t believe this story’s true,
Ask the blind man he saw it too!
I grew up being hauled from one end of the country to the other. Until the age of 6 I lived in NYC when my earth loving parents decided to relocate us lock, stock and barrel to the wilds of Northern Washington. Less these words conjure for you picturesque miles of verdant hills abutted by wind swept ocean shores, and polka-dotted with majestic evergreens outstreched towards an azure sky , allow me to disabuse you. We moved to a commune on the top of a mountain. A mountain so steep and rapid in incline that the locals had lovingly nicknamed the drive (up or down) “Londeem-o Scream-o.” We moved there in May, there was 3+ feet of snow on the ground. My little brother’s birthday is June 26th, it snowed. As it happened, the snow became the least of my concerns. When I say we moved to a commune, I mean an honest to god commune. We were completely off the grid, no power, no running water, no telephone, no radio, and, for several months a year, utterly impassable unless you had four-legged transportation. Four years later we moved again, this time to Knoxville, TN. A couple years went by and our feet got itchy, so off to Provo, Utah. This is a patttern that has dominated my life. I can, at this point, outpack an army wife, drive a 26ft moving truck through a blizzard that is snowing sideways, traverse the entire state of Wyoming while reading a book, and unpack and resettle my household in under a week–I have earned my crown damn it!
The entire point to my narrative it this; in my years wandering the lands the phrase,as I have always heard it, remains the same, “Tough titty said the kitty when the milk ran dry.” Now this makes sense to me, it has a nice follow through. Kittens want milk. Mama Kitty will only put up with the little beggars latching on to her with the ferocity of blood starved leeches for so long. If you have witnesses the end of this kitten Utopia you will have observed that Mama K’s teats look as thought she developed a bad case of eczema and she will be happy to jack-slap any offspring that feel the need to indulge in a nip of the mother nectar.
So lets review. Titty gets gnarly, kittens don’t get any more milk, and it is just frickin’ tough all the way around!
A couple of final thoughts.
-
Why the hell would your average cat give a meow if a cow quit spurting out the moo juice? :dubious:
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If the phrase is actually “tough titty said the kitty but the milks still good,” then “tough titty” should mean “Once you get past the dry crusty part there is a sweet juicy center, keep on nibbling!”
Southeastern US. Mid 70s.
The farmer said, “I seed it myself.”
The carpenter wagged his finger, “I saw it myself.”
The pornographer held up both his hands, then he sang, “Nobody knows the trouble obscene.”
to confuse your theory, I was just having a conversation and said the phrase “tough titties” and then my partner responded “what’s the rhyme that goes with that, something like ’ tough titties said the kitty, (can’t remember) milk went sour’?”
I’m from central saskatchewan, and have heard the ‘tough titties’, but don’t recall a rhyme with it. He’s from the North coast of British Columbia and remembers a rhyme, but can’t recall it exactly. (I was looking it up to find the rest, and found this - wow)
Among books scanned by google, “Tough titties” first emerged in 1971 in The Review: a magazine of poetry and criticism.
When one reads Those self-justifications by ex-ministers
And clapped-out members of extinct committees
One shrugs it off: BARBARA? that’s just tough titties.
I simply can’t abide Labour’s top brass…
Later the expression was used in the 1979 play Dreamgirls by Janis Rapoport. The phrase has had its ups and downs since then. I can’t say that I’m too fond of it.
Yes, but the phrase was used for at least fifty years before that (according to cites given earlier in this thread). Even I, myself, heard it in the 50’s.
But, “tough tits” to mean the same thing appears in Google books in 1921.
Ditto. Plus tough tittie.