Now say “Tizzie Lish” five times real fast.

Dear Word Detective: From where did the expression “all in a tizzy” come?  I have heard that it might be traced back to a coin, but I wondered if it might have something to do with the alcoholic beverage Tizwin (or Tiswin). — Carmen Christopher Caviness.

That’s an interesting guess. Wrong, but interesting. You’re still one step ahead of me, however, because I must admit I’d never heard of “tizwin” until I read your question. I assumed that my ignorance was just another example of my illiteracy in matters alcoholic, and that “tizwin” was either an exotic relative of absinthe (pretty exotic itself) or a crude concoction made, perhaps, of vodka and Windex and favored by newly-impoverished investment bankers. Then I realized that there is, as yet, no such thing as an impoverished investment banker and decided to actually look up “tizwin.”

According to the Encyclopedia of North American Indians (which is published by Houghton Mifflin and therefore presumably reliable), “tizwin” (or “tiswin”) is a “potent alcoholic beverage traditionally brewed by the Chiricahuas and Western Apaches.” Made from the mescal plant, tizwin was reputed to produce an especially boisterous species of drunk, and its manufacture and consumption on Indian reservations was banned in the late 19th century. The Apaches rightly resented this interference, and the ban prompted the Apache leader Geronimo to lead a breakout from the reservation.

None of that, however, has anything to do with “tizzy” meaning “an agitated state of nervous anxiety” (“Maybe it’s better for the future of the race to live from daze to daze in a perpetual tizzy like Alix,” Ladies Home Journal, 1938). Nor does “tizzy” in this “panic attack” sense have any apparent connection to the use of the word “tizzy” as antiquated British slang for a sixpence coin. That use may be related to the use of “tester” as slang for the same coin, which goes back to the Italian word “testa,” meaning “head,” and its derivative “teston,” a coin featuring the head of a ruler. The first such coin minted in England was a shilling (later devalued to sixpence) bearing the visage of Henry VII.

Since we’ve eliminated so many sources that didn’t produce the “tizzy” we’re investigating, pinpointing the correct origin should be a snap, right? This just in: Life not fair, film at 11. Nobody knows for sure where “tizzy” came from.  The most likely explanation may be our old pal onomatopoeia or “echoic formation,” the development of a word in imitation of the sound (or “feel”) of the thing itself. “Tizzy,” in this scenario, simply sounds like someone upset and anxious.

The question remains as to why “tizzy,” describing a truly ancient human condition, only first appeared in print in 1935. Etymologist Michael Quinion, on his excellent World Wide Words web page (worldwidewords.org), suggests that the sudden popularity of “tizzy” in the 1930s was due to a long-running (1929-47) US radio program called “Al Pearce and His Gang,” which featured a perpetually excitable and distracted character named Tizzie Lish. It’s possible, of course, that the character was named from an existing (but undocumented) folk term “tizzy.”  But since the word “tizzy” in the “state of anxiety” sense didn’t appear in print until this show had been on the air for a while, it’s also entirely possible that the actual origin of “tizzy” can be traced back to whoever named that character “Tizzy Lish.”

Without feathers, but I have glue.

Dear Word Detective:  How did “tempest” derive from “time”? — Anne.

Ah, a perilously direct and succinct question, sadly devoid of funny family anecdotes or exploitable cultural references, but not to worry.  Many years ago, in a secret martial word-arts academy in Bayonne, New Jersey, I learned the ancient rhetorical skill of disarming a direct, six-word question by answering it with a 300-word dissertation on domestic animal husbandry.  En garde, mon ami.

Kidding aside, I’m assuming that you actually looked up the two words in a dictionary, which told you they were related, which they are, in a way.  But it’s not entirely accurate to say that the word “tempest” was derived from the word “time.”  The two words aren’t directly linguistically related in English.  “Tempest,” however, is closely bound up with the concept of time.

Our English word “time” first appeared in Old English, drawn from the old Germanic root “timon,” which in turn was based on a root meaning “to stretch or extend.”  The earliest use of “time” in English was to mean “a finite period of continued existence,” as we use it today in such phrases as “a long time.”  Various other meanings were piled on “time” in short order, including “time” to mean the expanse of one’s life (e.g., “In my time we ate gravel for breakfast and loved it”), “time” meaning one’s personal experience of an event or occurrence (“I had a good time”), “time” meaning a specific moment hour and minute of the day (“What time is it?”), and “time” meaning “occasion” (“Remember that time we made chocolate-chip meatloaf?”).

As I said, “tempest” is rooted in the concept of “time,” but most of the evolution of the word took place before it reached English.  The Latin word for “time” (meaning both “time” in general and “the proper time for something to be done”) was “tempus” (which eventually gave us the English word “temporary”).  “Tempestas,” a Latin derivative of “tempus,” meant “period of time” or, more importantly, “season of the year.”  Since the most notable feature of a season is its weather, “tempestas” came to mean “weather,” and since the most memorable weather is usually bad, “tempestas” came to mean, over the years, “bad weather,” “storm,” and finally “violent storm.”  When “tempest” finally appeared in English, drawn from Old French in the 13th century, it was with the meaning, still the main one in use today, of “violent storm with high winds, rain, hail, etc.”

That Latin “tempus” meaning “time,” by the way, may be connected to several other English words, although we can’t be absolutely certain.  “Tempus” seems to have given birth to the Latin verb “temperare,” meaning “to mix properly, moderate or blend,” probably as an outgrowth of the “proper or suitable time” meaning of “tempus.”  Its English derivative “temper,” which appeared in the 14th century, originally meant “mixture of elements,” but came to mean “mixture of mental traits,” which eventually gave us “temper” meaning “mood,” etc.  That same root “temperare” also gave us “temperature” (originally “moderate” weather, later “degree of warmth”), as well as “temperate” and “temperance” (originally simply meaning “moderation”).