titchy

英文词源

titchy

titchy: [20] Titchy commemorates the ‘Tichborne claimant’, the title given to Arthur Orton, who, in an English cause célèbre of the 1860s, returned from Australia claiming to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to an English baronetcy who had supposedly been lost at sea. The diminutive music-hall comedian Harry Relph (1868–28) bore some resemblance to Orton, and so he acquired the nickname ‘Little Tich’.

This in due course spread to other small people (the tiny Kent and England leg-spinner A P Freeman (1888–1965) was called ‘Tich’), but it does not appear to have been until the 1950s that tich, or titch, established itself as a colloquial generic term for a ‘small person’. With it came the derived adjective titchy.