Tit

Tit (pronounced tit)

(1) Any of numerous small active old world songbirds of the family Paridae, especially those of the former genus Parus.

(2) Medieval slang for a girl or young woman thought something of a minx.

(3) A small, worthless or worn-out poor horse; a nag (archaic).

(4) Slang for a despicable or unpleasant person (archaic).

(5) Slang for a teat (used in agricultural and other circles).

(6) As tit-bit, a small morsel of food.

(7) One of the many vulgar slang terms for the human female’s breast (mammary gland).

Circa 1600: From the mid sixteenth century Middle English titte, from the pre 1100 Old English titt and cognate with the Middle Low German & Middle Dutch titte, the German as zitze, the Icelandic tittr and the Norwegian titta.  The Scandinavian forms applied to small birds and the Old English titt was a variant of teat.  The modern slang variation, attested from 1928, seems to be a recent reinvention from teat, used apparently without awareness it’s a throwback to the original form although the form is on record from 1746 as an English and Irish diminutive of teat, used in nurseries.

In ornithology, tits, chickadees, and titmice constitute the Paridae, a large family of small passerine birds found mostly in Africa and the more temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere and Africa.  Most were formerly classified in the genus Parus and in the English-speaking the terms chickadee & titmice tend to be used in North America while its tits elsewhere.  The creatures are mainly small, stocky, woodland species with short, stout bills, some with crests and ranging in length between 4-9 inches (100-220 mm), they have a mixed diet including seeds and insects and have adapted well to co-habitation with humans in urban environments.  It’s a charming linguistic coincidence that ornithological taxonomy has given English the black-breasted tit (Periparus rufonuchalis), the cinnamon-breasted tit (Melaniparus pallidiventris) and the stripe-breasted tit (Melaniparus fasciiventer).

A pair of small tits (Pseudopodoces humilis; left) and pair of great tits (Parus major; right).

The smallest of the tits is the golden-breasted tit (or small tit) (Pseudopodoces humilis).  Genuinely tiny, in some places it’s known also as the ground tit or Hume's ground tit and measures usually between 100-130 mm (4-4.9 inches) in length, weighing around (.56 oz).  The largest of the tits is the widely distributed great tit (Parus major) which measures usually between 135-155 mm (5.3-6.1 inches) in length and weighs between 16 to 21 grams. (6-.81 oz).

The origin of familiar use of “tit” as slang for “breast, human female mammary gland” (now also as "tittie" or "titty" although they also enjoyed other meanings) lies in the Old English titt (teat, nipple, breast), used as a variant of teat or from the dialectal and nursery diminutive plural variant “titties”.  Perhaps surprisingly, it appears the modern slang use in this context (predictably, almost always in the plural) dates only from 1928 (oral use may have pre-dated this) and the adoption (actually a re-invention) is thought unrelated to the original form.  The tradition was however long because in the Middle English the singular was often tete or tate, often used figuratively to mean both “source of (spiritual) nourishment” and by the late fourteenth century, an “object of erotic attraction”.  In modern slang use, it appears the use of “tits” was almost exclusively male until the 1970s when it became of the words “reclaimed” by feminists as a political statement although, as a general principle women seem still to prefer “boobs” although there seems more acceptance of "fake tits" as a critique.

By the 1540s “tit” was used for a small or unproductive horse, the sense of something “diminutive” transferring over later centuries to other small creatures, most enduringly in birds such as the titmouse, tom-tit, titlark, titling, tit-babbler et al although not all survived to be added to modern taxonomy such as the late nineteenth century titty-todger (a wren).  In the Nordic nations, the Icelandic tittr, the Norwegian tita and the Old Norse titling were all used of small birds but etymologists are uncertain about the connection, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) suggesting the link was of either something small rather than anything specific to birds or even onomatopoeic, drawn from the “chip-chipping” sound of small songbirds.  At least by 1706 it was common slang for “titmouse” and by 1734 was used figuratively of persons but between the sixteenth & eighteenth centuries a “tit” could be a “girl or young woman” and while that could be merely descriptive, it was applied often in the deprecatory sense of “a hussy or minx” (though apparently not actually a prostitute).

The form “tit-bit” (small, delicate snack of food; a sweet morsel) was in use by the 1630s and was synonymous with “tidbit” which was in concurrent use, the coining of that thought to be the dialectal tid (fond, solicitous, tender (itself perhaps influenced by the relevant sense of “tit”)) + bit (in the sense of “a morsel”).  Also surviving into modern use is “tit for tat”, an expression indicating “a retaliatory return), first documented in the 1550s and from this ultimately came “titfer” which appeared in UK dictionaries of rhyming slang as a substitute for “hat” (in from the “that” element).  “Tit for tat” may have been an variant of the earlier “tip for tap” (blow for blow) which carried the same implication.  The game tick-tack-toe (noughts & crosses) was so named at least by 1892 but according to oral historians, decades before that it had been known as tit-tat-toe (by 1852, in reminiscences of earlier years), the names thought derived from the sound made by the pencil on the slate with which it originally was played by schoolboys.  The modern slang “taking the bull by the tits” is an absurdist variant of “taking the bull by the horns” (confronting a problem and dealing with it in a manner prompt, resolute & effective”); it suggests someone is doing something wrong or has misunderstood (ie they have NFI).