While standing in line this week to get into movies at the Toronto International Film Festival, I noticed an incongruity. The people in those long, snaking lineups are models of politeness and amiability. Yet the acronym of the festival is TIFF, and since the 18th century a tiff has been a minor disagreement, a tiny spat that hasn't the strength or will to graduate to a full fight. You don't see many tiffs around the festival, unless a grumpy filmgoer gives a festival volunteer a hard time, or an actor gets prickly when asked the same dumb question 10 times in a row. (The prospect of Brad Pitt running into his ex, Jennifer Aniston, prompted the Sept. 4 headline in these pages, "A tiff at TIFF?")
No one seems to know how "tiff" originated. The word had been around in the 1600s as a synonym for inferior liquor, and may have had some connection to "tipple," which had been a synonym for liquor since the 1500s. In fact, since the 1300s a fellow who sold liquor had officially been known as a tippler, a word that much later referred to the fellow who drank the stuff. But tiff as liquor didn't last long, and by the mid-1700s Samuel Richardson was using the word to refer to a spat. "My Lord and I have had another little tiff, shall I call it?" he wrote in The History of Sir Charles Grandison. "It came not up to a quarrel."
The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that tiff was onomatopoeic - that it conveyed "the sound of a slight puff of air or gas," and that someone therefore coined the word to describe a slight venting of disagreement. Perhaps the earlier tiff recalled the sound made when a tippler opened a bottle of liquor. The film festival should test this theory by handing out small bottles of tipple to everyone standing in line for its movies.
Then there's the word "film." Here the trail is straighter. A movie came to be known as a film because movies were shot on film, raw stock that took its name from the 19th-century coating on photographic paper or plates. This film in turn echoed the centuries-old meaning of film as a membrane or skin. The Anglo-Saxon word for membrane was filmen, similar to felma, which described the skin of an egg. Follow the word back to Latin, amending the fel to pel, and you arrive at the source word, pellis, meaning skin. That actors in some films show a lot of skin is merely a coincidence.
QUITE A DAY BOO
A promotional card for a November stage production of It's a Wonderful Life arrived in the mail, but somebody at Toronto's Canadian Stage Company must have been nodding. "Since it's premier in 1996," the card said, "this inventive adaptation of a beloved classic has continued to earn critical acclaim." It may be a premier work, but it had its premiere in 1996. On the bright side, the play wasn't billed as I ts a Wonderful Life.
A CWMFUL OF EPICOTYLS
When I participated in spelling bees many years ago, teams were expected to spell such words as mischievous and scourge. We had it easy, if a new book called Oxford Canadian Spelling Bee Dictionary is any guide. Edited by Katherine Barber, Lisa Devries, Heather Fitzgerald and Robert Pontisso, it consists of words considered challenging, their pronunciations, their definitions, and notes on etymology. So cat and dog aren't in here, but epicotyl and porphyry are.
I pity the pupil asked to spell the words pronounced "coom" ( cwm, a valley in Wales) and "TEE shuck" ( Taoiseach, the prime minister of the Irish republic, from the Irish word for chief or leader). Having grown up inexplicably pronouncing tomato as "tuh MOUH toe" (middle vowel as in mouth), I am disappointed to find that the consensus is still restricted to "tuh MAY toe" and "tuh MAT oh." But then, I'm still living down the shame of having misspelled scourge in the heat of bee battle.