All right, let’s address the tit situation. You’ve left me no choice.
In bird names like blue tit, great tit and coal tit, the word tit traces back to an old Middle English name titmouse, which simply meant a small bird. In Middle English it appeared as titmose or titmase, where tit was a word for something small, and the second element came from Old English māse, an old name for these little birds. Over time speakers confused mose/mase with the more familiar English word mouse, even though these birds aren’t rodents at all, and eventually dropped the second part altogether, leaving just tit in the bird names. This shortening still survives in British usage, while in North America titmouse (or chickadee) is still used for many members of this family.
The Old English māse is part of a broader Germanic family of words for these lively songbirds: it survives today in German Meise, Dutch mees and Swedish mes for the same kinds of small birds. The related French mésange ultimately comes from the same cluster of medieval names.
As for the completely unrelated modern English slang word, tit is connected to Old English tit(t), Middle Low German and Dutch titte, and German Zitze, and probably began as a nursery term, perhaps echoing the sound made while suckling. Meanwhile, Swedish mes has taken on a figurative sense of a timid or weak person, which is extremely unfair to the actual birds, many of which are bold, acrobatic and surprisingly feisty at the garden feeder.
And that concludes today’s lecture on the tit situation. I fully expect the jokes to continue. I just hope you will now deploy them with proper etymological awareness.
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