*Warning: contains double entendres
Alright, stop tittering at the back. There’s nothing amusing about the word chit, any more than there is about other everyday gardening terms, such as butt, harden off or dibber. Now pay attention, here’s a question for you: what connects a potato to a big cat? (And no, the answer isn’t gaffer tape, although that probably would work.)
The answer, in case you haven’t guessed yet, is the word chit.
Chitting is bang in vogue right now. As any potato enthusiast knows, if you haven’t chitted by the end of March you may have left it too late. For those who don’t grow, chitting is the process of encouraging potatoes to sprout before you sow them. It makes them grow faster and gives a better crop, you see?
So if you’re passing the allotments and you overhear someone saying they’ve come down with the chitters, don’t be alarmed. It just means they’ve arrived with the seed potatoes. You can lean confidently on the fence and cheerfully join in the conversation with something like, “Aye, and you should see the size of my pink fir apples.”
So that’s what the verb to chit means. It comes from an old English term for a small sprout, and prior to that the young of an animal, from which we also get the expression “a chit of a girl”, a phrase we’ve been using to dismiss young, insolent girls since the early 17th century.
“And the cat?” I hear you ask wearily.
Ah yes, the cat.
When I was at school and we were given an official letter to take home to our parents, we’d be told to “come back with the chits” the next day. It always got a laugh, apart from the time Paul ____ took the joke literally and they had to close the canteen for a week.
The chit (or chitty) in this instance was the small, tear-off strip of paper at the bottom of the letter, which your parents would sign to say they were happy for you to go to Lullingstone Roman Villa and wouldn’t complain if the school happened not to bring you back, or words to that effect.
I always assumed chitty was a term of endearment for a chit, just as kitty is for a cat (that’s not the connection, by the way – it’s much better than that) but it was, in fact, a word brought back from India in the 18th century, along with chutney and bungalows. It was derived from the Hindi ‘chitthi’ (pronounced ‘chitthi’), meaning a letter or note. This in turn came from ‘chitra-s’, which was an old Sanskrit word meaning ‘distinctively marked’.
I feel I’m rushing to the conclusion now. I want to hold it back and build up the anticipation but I suspect you might already have guessed the connection. OK, here goes.
From that Sanskrit word, via various metamorphoses, we get…
Cheetah!
Isn’t that amazing?
So there’s your connection: from potatoes to big cats in one seamless stream of cobblers. And if you’re reading this tomorrow, remember to plant your spuds facing north-east. They taste better that way.
