A Cecil classic...

[Bruce Dykes]

>From the source...http://www.straightdope.com/

A Straight Dope Classic from Cecil's storehouse of human knowledge


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In Thoreau's Walden, what are "tit-men"?
08-Nov-1996


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Dear Cecil:

At one point in Walden, Henry David Thoreau, having grown bored with making
the reader feel grubbily materialistic if he cannot carry all of his
belongings on his back, moves on to rub the reader's nose in his puny
intellectual attainments: "I confess I do not make a very broad distinction
between the illiterateness of my townsman who cannot read at all, and the
illiterateness of him who has learned to read only what is for children and
feeble intellects. We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but
partly by first knowing how good they were. We are a race of tit-men, and
soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the
daily paper."

Assuming Hank Dave was not channeling Russ Meyer or Howard Stern, what the
devil did he mean by "tit-men"? The context suggests he meant men
preoccupied by life's inessentials--souls who lie in the gutter but fail to
look up at the stars, or some such. Maybe he's comparing us with birds. But
as I can't find the phrase in any old dictionaries I can't be sure. Would
you be good enough to shine the refulgent beacon of your nonesuch
intelligence upon this umbrageous niche of Thoreauvia? --David English, West
Somerville, Massachusetts

Cecil replies:

Oh, David, I love it when you talk dirty like that. This is a topic I am
happy to decrepusculate. I will even forgive Henry D.'s slighting reference
to "the columns of the daily paper." Clearly he foresaw even then that truly
mind-expanding journalism would be carried only in weeklies.

The reason you couldn't find "tit-men" in any old dictionaries is that you
can't use just any old dictionary. For industrial-strength knowledge you
want the Oxford English Dictionary, which tells us that a "titman" is "the
smallest pig, etc. of a litter; hence, a man who is stunted physically or
mentally; a dwarf, a 'croot.'"

So now you know. A tit-man (titman, whatever) is a croot. The phrase "soar
but little higher" inclines one to think that Thoreau is also making a
punning allusion to a similarly named species of bird.

Reminds me of a story. Two mice are in an English music hall watching a
chorus line. "Lovely legs, haven't they?" says the first mouse. "Oh, I don't
know," says the other. "I'm a titmouse myself."

--CECIL ADAMS