dither and piffle and twitter and witter

I am still in the digression begun in the previous essay but will sooner or later pull myself back into normalcy. In that essay I provided a list of 49 terms for intoxication published in a 1928 article in American Speech. The author, Professor Prenner, spent very little time interpreting the list, other than to note that he encountered a few of the terms, including my favorite ("stuccoed"; I also like "squiffed," based on the term "squiff" meaning a contemptible person) in English literary works, while several of the terms are taken from the preparation of food: "basted, canned, fried, boiled, potted, preserved, pickled, soused."

Not to be outdone, Mr. Lowry Axley supplemented Prenner's list in a brief entry in a 1929 article in American Speech. He includes the following:

about gone, all gone, or gone
bleary-eyed
flooey
got a bun on
half shot
illuminated
knocked out
laid out
lit to the guards
lubricated
on a bender
on a jag
'pifflicated
seeing snakes
soaked
up to the gills.

He also lists names for intoxicants of many varieties, which I will not relate here. Finally, he closes with some amusing similes. A drunk person is "lit up like a church" or "drunk as a b'iled owl" or "drunk as a fish." If you drink you "take a shot" or "take a snifter" or "wet your goozle." I think we have several other terms to describe a drunk person, don't you? This web site certainly thinks so.

Suffice it to say that the term most popular when I was in college, even though I never imbibed, was smashed. The OED informs us, however, that smashed as a synonym for drunk only first appeared in 1962: "Are you figuring on getting smashed?" The way the guys used the term around Brown in the early 1970s, however, suggested that it had been around since the Garden of Eden. But there was an emerging competitor with smashed in the refined atmosphere of Kappa Delta Upsilon at Brown in the early 1970s: wasted. My fraternity (I know why I joined it, but I never partook of its benefits) had a number of crew athletes in it, who would periodically, mostly after grueling regattas, get wasted. Little did I know at the time that the word, relating to intoxication, only emerged in the late 1960s, according to a University of South Dakota dictionary of slang. So, once again, Brown University was at the forefront of important societal movements.

But before I really return to the thought that began the previous essay, I need to mention one other thing. In his wonderful book The English Language (1921), H. L. Mencken (1890-1956) lists the following words for drunk, "plffled, pifflicated, awry-eyed, tanked, snotted, stewed, ossified, slopped, fiddled, edged, loaded, het-up, frazzled, jugged, soused, jiggered, corned, jagged, and bunned." I think you now have enough words for all occasions where alcohol is being served.

Returning to Reality

I got started on this long digression in the previous essay where I was going to explore synonyms of the verb piffle: witter, dither, fiddle and fritter. As you recall, piffle meant to talk nonsense or in a "trivial, inept or ineffective way."

1. Witter. Though the verb has an ancient meaning of "inform" or "instruct," the more modern signification of the word is "to chatter or mutter; to grumble; to speak with annoying lengthiness on trivial matters." The first use of the word in this sense only came from the early 19th century, in one of Andrew Scott's poems: "The winking swankies whitter..." I'll pass on reading Scott's poems, thank you. It might seem surprising that the word has been attested several times in the past 40 years. From 1966: "You might..try making the tea, instead of wittering on about Cordon Blue methods." Then, from 1982: "If I wasn't going to hear the Tories wittering on in Brighton this week, I'd be in Frankfurt listening to publishers wittering on at the annual Book Fair." Though the word originated in a Scottish dialetical usage, I wonder if its similarity to "twitter" might not lead to its being associated with that word. Then, again, a recent quotation I saw makes witter synonynmous with ramble-- one can "witter on" in conversation. Mumble, grumble, rumble, ramble, mutter, witter, twitter, piffle. Words are often not carriers of precise meaning.

2. Dither. I don't see how dither can mean piffle. Or, maybe there is one tenuous connection. The OED defines dither as "to tremble, quake, quiver, thrill." More colloquially now it means "to vacillate, to act indecisively, to waver between different opinions or courses of action." Its first attestation in 1649 gives us the "quaking" meaning, which may be the connection with piffle--though the latter stresses a softer quaking, such as mumbling or grumbling. Nevertheless, we have, from 1649: "He saw the said Sara Rodes...her body quakeing and dithering about halfe a quarter of an hower." Then, from an English translation of Horace's Odes in 1666: "So tremulous is she/ Dith'ring both in heart and knee." By the early 20th century, however, the word was used primarily in the sense of delaying or acting indecisively. From 1927: "While governments dither and talk limply of disarmament and peace large numbers of normally inarticulate citizens grown increasingly restive."

I think I am out of space here, but there may be parts of one more essay in me on the other synonyms of piffle.

1877