Easy there link masters, I know what TTFN means. I do have a question about it though.
I have a Scottish mate who hasn’t been on a computer in his life. He dropped into conversation the other day, “Back home in Glasgow, we have an expression, ’ tee tee eff en’.” He was surprised when I interjected with the full version, and ever more surprised when I told him it was a standard piece of netspeak.
He left Glasgow in the mid 80s, so it’s unlikely to have hit the streets from the internet.
Has anybody else ever seen this used outside cyberspace? Are other net expressions similarly used?
TTFN probably did hit the streets from BBS systems and other incredibly slow text protocols that were the techie thing before the 1980s. However, I believe “ta-ta” was a British sort of thing to say before that, so there may have been a sort of heterodyning thing going on.
I was in seventh grade in 1980, and my yearbook is full of such tripe. TTFN, FFA (Friend Forever Always), FF (Not as endearing as the previous), JK (Just Kidding), etc. etc.
If my 7th grade photo didn’t have the inate ability to seer my eyeballs, I would peruse it tonight for more of the same.
TTFN as in “ta-ta for now”? Seeing as how the only place I have ever seen it used was in The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh, that would be my guess. At least, I would assume that that’s where the phrase came into common parlance.
Jimmy Young. Radio broadcaster on BBC 2. Used to end his show with this every day, it was his catch phrase, among others and long, long before BBS and internet.
Actually it was Tigger who would always say it. And in the Disney-fied versions (like the records I had as a kid), he would say the full phrase, “TTFN! Ta-ta for now!”
I’m assuming it predates A. A. Milne’s use of it, but I don’t have any idea where to find a cite for something like that.
I’m familiar with the full expressions “ta-ta”, and “ta-ta for now”, as they are used here in Australia as well as the UK (maybe not so much these days though, more when I was a kid). I’m more curious as to the abbreviated form, and why pre-internet folks would bother using an abbreviation which takes the same effort to say as the monosyllables it replaces. Was it a cutesy thing which just happened to lend itself well to the internet? Which did Jimmy Young use?
I heard Jimmy Young being interviewed a little while ago and guess what? He claimed never to have said TTFN on his show at all.
Now, Jimmy is of an advanced age (he claims 79, the BBC say 81) so he may not be the most reliable witness even to his own words. I’ve never actually heard his show even though it lasted from 1973 to January this year, so I can’t say from first hand whether he was telling the truth or not. He did become known for using abbreviations and acronyms, even calling his show the “JY Prog” for Jimmy Young Programme, but the “JY always said TTFN” thing might just have the same provenance as “Play it again Sam” or “You dirty rat”.
Anyhow, none of that matters because the original source of the expression was Tommy Handley, whose radio show It’s That Man Again – or ITMA as it was more commonly known – ran from 1939 to '48. That show was also well known for comic characters, catchphrases and abbreviations including TTFN. We can therefore assume that Young was a fan.
That doesn’t explain how it got started on the internet, or in places beyond British influence, but in case anyone cares, nobody in the UK says ta-ta for goodbye these days unless they’re intending it to sound humorous; I’d guess it must have died out of regular use some time in the '40s or '50s.
Good heavens, yes. The English were using “TTFN” during World War II – I grew up hearing that, via my mother who was born in 1927 and only left England (first time) in 1945.
It was fairly common here in New Zealand up until the mid 1980s.
I remember first seeing that expression on a horror film. I think it was “Witchboard” or something like that, it was one of those teens slice and dash type of film. A character in the movie said “TTFN” as she was leaving the apartment, someone replied what it meant and she said “Ta-ta-for-now” and then walked out the door. She was later murdered. I remember seeing that phrase pop up all over the place afterwards. The character was played by Carol Burnett’s daughter.
I think he might be losing it a bit. My mother used to listen to him on the radio all the time and I’m almost certain he ended shows with something along the lines of “This is Jimmy Young saying TTFN.” However, it appears he didn’t invent the saying, but he certainly helped make it popular.
Jimmy Young did not say TTFN. What he used to say was “This is Jimmy Young saying BFN – Bye For Now”. Exactly those, words, with exactly the same intonation, time after time after time. Five days a week. For DECADES. It’s burned into my brain, and I wish it wasn’t.
TTFN certainly came from ITMA, and Jimmy Young needn’t have been a fan to remember the phrase. ITMA was phenomenally popular during the war years, and those few people who didn’t listen would have been unable to escape hearing everybody else repeating the catchphrases. I was born in 1962 (long after the show went off the air), and I remember being aware of several of the catchphrases many years before I found out where they came from.
As to how the phrase became known in America: catchphrases (and obscure initials) have always been popular in military circles, and I seem to remember reading that there were a few american servicemen over here at the time.
