tit-men

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

>The phrase “soar but little higher” inclines one to think that Thoreau is also making a punning allusion to a similarly named species of bird

With apologies to Rufus Wainwright, this a bird pun. In England, the small birds that Americans call “chickadees” are called “tits.” There are birds called “great tits” and “penduline tits,” for example. I don’t have an OED handy, but this usage is probably very old, and naturalist like Thoreau would probably know it. The American name “chickadee” is an onimonipiea of course; and so is “tit,” imitating a call. Perhaps the prudes on this side of the pond avoided “tit” as a bird name due to the collision with “tit” meaning “teat” (but we do have bush tits, which are smaller than chickadees and remarkably gregarious). Anyway, the Thoreau passage makes good sense if you read “tit-men” to mean something like “small birds.”

Steve Pendleton

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The tufted titmouse is a common bird in the eastern US; no need to go all the way to England for a bird pun. (Although the article I linked to suggests they weren’t as common in the northern part of their current range in Thoreau’s time.)

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Welcome Steve.

tit is not imitative. It’s a word meaning “small”. As a bird name it’s been applied collectively not only to titmice but also to other small birds.
Scandinavian tit small
Norwegian titta any small bird
English *tit *a little person; Thoreau’s tit-men means just that
English titbit, tidbit a little, tiddy small
onimonipiea: nice word to be added to the Webster :slight_smile:

4

Welcome to the SDMB, Steve.

A link to the column you’re commenting on is appreciated. Providing one can be as simple as pasting the URL into your post, making sure to leave a blank space on either side of it. Like so: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_154a.html

5

Gymnopithys, I don’t know where you got your info about scandinavian languages from, but I have never heard the word “tit” to mean small in Swedish, and I strongly suspect there has never been such a word.

The bird is called “Tita” in Swedish and I find the spellings “Tit”,“Tite”, and “Tita” in Norwegian. My dictionary says it is indeed onomatopoeic - Norwegian “Tite” also means “to chirp/twitter”.

Perhaps you are confusing it with the word “Liten”, which is the word for “small” in the scandinavian languages.

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Icel. tittr, Norw. tite, tita “a little bird” (Klein, 1971. Comprehensive etymological dictionary of the English language. Elsevier. Norw. titta is teat, “akin to tit” (Webster’s).
Engl. dial. and slang. 1. tit “a small horse”. 2. “A very small person or thing; a chit; a morsel, bit”. 4. “small faggots for kindling”. 5. a minute hole in a piece of cloth. tit. “the wren”. titing “the titlark”; titling “the Meadow Pipit”; titty “small, tiny, little”; the wren; tittynope “a small quantit of anything”; tiddy, tiddly “very small”; tiddler “a small trout”; tiddy-wren “the wren”; tiddy-white-throat Sylvia cinerea" (Joseph Wright, 1970, The English dialect dictionary, vol. 7. Oxf. Univ. Press).

titty, tidley Essex the Wren (Swainson, C. 1885. Provincial names and folk lore of British birds).

Also for the Wren:
tit e.York., Ire.: Coleraine, Ess., titty Ess., w.Cy., Glo., Oxf., Suff., Wil., Som., Som., Dev., tintie Not., tittywren Glo., Suff., Wilt., titter-wren Glo., Suff., tit-o-wren litt., tittereen Suff., tiddy-wren Ess., w.Cy., tittywran Ire.: Coleraine, tidly, tiddly w.Som., Dev., tidley Ess., w.Cy., Som., Dev., tiddley-wren Som., tidley-creeper (-), tiddle, tiddle-tope, tiddlee, tiddlee-tope Devon, titty-todger Devon, Som.

And chit “small” (Oxf. Engl. Dict.). Names for the Wren: chit, chit-wren Ire.: Down, jitty Ches., chitty York., Lanc., Cumb., Westm., Kent, n.Lanc., Ire.: Lurgan, Antr., Down, Midl., Ballymena, Hillsborough, Islandmagee, Cookstown, chitter Kent, chitty-wran Scot., chitty-wran Ulster, Antr., Down, Donegal, Dunadry, chitty-wren Som., Antrim, chatter-hen Cumb., chitter-wren Westm., chittywer-wren Lanc., chittywi-wren w.York., cf. chit “a child or young person” (Wright, Swainson etc.)

I have also consulted the following (Scandinavian) works:

Hantsch, Bernhardt, 1905. Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Vogelwelt Islands. Friedländer & Sohn, Berlin.

Hortling, Ivar, 1944. Svenska fågelnamn. Försök till tydning av deras ijnnebord. Bok förlaget Natur och Kultur. Helsingfors.

Kjærbølling, Niels, 1875-1877. Skandinaviens Fugle. Helsingfors.

Wetterwik, Sinar, 1962. Europeiska fågelnamns forekomst i släkt-och apoteksanamn jämte etymologiska notiser. Vår Fågelvärld, 28: 211-226.

Haftorn, Svein, 1971. Norges Fugler. Universitetsforlaget, Oslo.

Brøndegaard, V.J. 1985. Folk og fauna. Vol. 2. Rosenkilde of Bagger, Købnhavn.

Tyrberg, Tommy, 1996. Svenska fåglars namn. Ursprung, historia och innebörd. Vår Fågelvärld, suppl. No. 24, 82 p.

Cf. also:

Scand. tit small
Icelandic tittr any small bird
Norwegian tita any small bird
English Scotland titling smallest in a brood
Norwegian tite and var. Titmouse
Czech titêra trifle
Czech tít’ák Wren, 406
Latvian tita chick
Spanish tita (Basque id.) hen
Catalan: Baleares tit chicken, young of an animal
French: Liège (childish) titi hen
Anc.Greek titthós small; child
Italian south titu small

7

Although a Google search for “tit” brings up all kinds of entertaining results, it is interesting to know that the linked column by Cecil is the only result on the entire World Wide Web for the word decrepusculate!!!

There are exactly eight results for “crepusculate”, but none of the authors seems to agree on the meaning. “Crepusculate” doesn’t appear on m-w.com or dictionary.com, but both of those sites list “crepuscule” as meaning “twilight or dusky”.

I’m going to choose to believe that “crepusculate” means “to become dusk, or to fall into obscurity” and further postulate that Cecil’s inventive “decrepusculate” means “bring out of dusk, or to bring back from obscurity”.

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Gymnopithys, I’m impressed by your northern European erudition, but about half your references show that tit = “small bird.” Now your first point was that “tit is not imitative.” With respect, references showing that “tit” has meant “small bird” in for centuries is not evidence that “tit” as a bird name is not imitative. Bird names often ARE imitative, and the other “small” associations might derive from the bird anology and not vice versa. I agree I’m asking you to to prove a negative for an etyomological point perhaps lost to history. Still, small birds like tits often have “tit”-like contact calls, which by my speculative and uneducated instinct may well be the root of the tree for this root.

–Steve Pendleton

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I agree with stevep on this one. You certainly have an impressive list of reference literature (how did you get a hold of a copy of that issue of “Vår Fågelvärld” from 1962?), Gymnopithys, but I feel that your approach is a little unscientific. You have a long list of words with the letters “tit” or “titty” in them but there is nothing to indicate that they are actually related in any way. Just because titty- or tiddy- have been used to form a diminutive does not mean that the name of the bird known as “tit” got its name because it is small. Or that the “titty” names for the wren are related to the “tit”.

I actually tried to check out the works you have “consulted” but the only one I could find was: “Tyrberg, Tommy, 1996. Svenska fåglars namn. Ursprung, historia och innebörd. Vår Fågelvärld, suppl. No. 24”. But since its the most recent work I think we can assume that Tyrberg has the latest info.

Tyrberg writes about the two most common birds in Sweden today that are called “tita”: the entita (marsh tit), and the talltita (Willow tit), where the “Talltita” name is a later construction (1871) built in analogy with entita, substituting one tree - “en” with another - “tall”.
This is what ha has to say about the “entita”:

Entita Parus palustris

Namnet nämns första gången av Rudbeck ca. 1700 (Rudbeck 1968-71) men är säkert äldre. “En-” sannolikt av växtnamnet en Juniperus communis, “tita” ljudhärmande, troligen besöktat med eng. tit “mes”.

rough translation: Name first mentioned by Rudbeck 1700 but surely older. “En-” from the plant name “en”, “tita” onomatopoeic, probably related to English “tit”.

…the key word here being “ljudhärmande”(onomatopoeic)

…and this is from “Våra ord”, a Swedish etymological dictionary published by Nordstedts 1960:

tita (småfåglar av messäktet, Parus, t. ex. entita kärrmes, tall-, göktita: no. tita; ljudhärmande

(notice again “ljudhärmande”)

another Swedish etymological dictionary -“svensk etymologisk ordbok” ( project runeberg link)has the following to say:

tita, mes, Parus, jfr Schroderus Com.
1640: thela (die kleine meise) = no.
tita, jfr isl. tittr, mes, eng. tilmoiise,
jämte sv. dial. lyla, let, lät, no. o. norrl.
dial. té ta, täta-, efter vissa för mesarna
gemensamma läten, som bruka återges
med // ti osv.; jfr gök ty t a. Något
j slags gemensam grundform för dessa
ord med i, e, ä har icke existerat. -
Sålunda ej att förbinda med isl. titlingr,
sparv, no. titing o. sv. tätting, av
annat ursprung.

the middle part of this says “, after certain sounds the Parus have in common, which are usually recalled as ti ti etc. " [snip]” not to be connected with isl. titlingr, sparrow, no. titing and sw. tätting of different origin."
…but what I really wanted to know was where you got this from:

Scandinavian tit small

did you just leave out the word “bird” here or is there any evidence that tit means small in “scandinavian”?

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"Scandinavian tit “small”: I have that from some etymological dictionary - I didn’t invent it - it’s probably a dialectal word. I regret very much I don’t have the reference anymore; hard to retrieve from a 60-page bibliography…

If you contend that tit is onomatopoeic, then all birds having the root tit- in their names would have the same call-note which certainly isn’t the case. Check any bird book. Or you’ll have to give a different etymology for each word with this root (as your cite imparts).

I have proposed another etymology by grouping the names, taking into account other Indo-European names rather than restricting to a single language group. You may reject it. Of course you have the dictionaries on your side.

Regards

Thank you for the link.
(I’ve taken note of the defective copying l for t, ii for u - not your fault)

11

I don’t agree with your conclusion that all birds named tit must have a similar sound in their call-note. The name may very well have been applied to one bird for that reason originally, and then transfered to other birds because they may have similar physical appearances.

That said, I’m sorry if I came off as rude. I have checked your homepage now and I see that you have years of experience in the field and may very well have grounds for your beliefs. The only knowledge I have is what I have read in my dictionary since I joined this discussion.

As to the origin of the word “tit” it seems that nobody really knows for sure. Tyrberg notes that most swedish bird names are only a few hundred years old although some roots, like “tita”, are obviously older.

12

And you have a barely-remembered something or other from some book sometime. Maybe.

Come on, seriously now.
.

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You didn’t sound rude, Hudvudvätt.
I see that most links on my home page don’t work. You might try this presentation of my work:
http://www.bird-name.org/english/index.htm

Andros, you’re right: on this point I failed miserably.