Little Words

I don’t care one whit, not an iota, nary a bit about that, and it’s a tad selfish and a mite foolish of you to bring it up. If you had a smidgen of self-respect… Well, I don’t.

As the highlighted linked words show, we have already discussed whit and iota, but a coworker of mine used the word “tad” this week, and sent me off on this foray into small words about small things. What’s the difference between whit, iota, bit, tad, mite, and smidgen? And does it make a difference which one you use? And what do these words have to do with Abraham Lincoln, pirates, or the Bible?

Let’s start with Lincoln. I knew that President Lincoln referred to his son Thomas as Tad, but I was not aware that he coined the nickname and the word we use to describe a small amount or quantity of something. The speculation is that the President gave his son the nickname “Tad” as a shortened form of tadpole. While Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 and “Tad” died in 1871 at age 18, the use of the word tad to describe a small child (especially a boy) is first recorded in 1877. However, it was used only in reference to small children until 1915, the first recorded use in reference to something other than a child. Today it’s primarily used in reference to small amounts, or a bit of something.

Bit, on the other hand, first came into use in English in about 1200, a relative of the Old English words bite, which we still use, and bita, which refers to that which was bitten off. (No reference to it being the past tense of bite yet.) The act of biting is why we use it to describe the piece of a drill that actually does the boring (as opposed to the kind of boring I’m doing right now). That usage developed in the 1590s. And of course, the part of the bridle placed in the horse’s mouth has since the 14^th century been called a bit, since that’s what the horse did with the piece. It wasn’t until after these two usages were in place that the word came to refer to a small amount or a piece of something. (The first use in that sense was about 1600.) Its expansion to refer to time rather than an object took place in the 1650s. And so it remained until 1909 when a small part in a theatrical production came to be known as a bit part.

But there’s one other usage that evokes images of pirates and the bounding main. The Spanish Real was in colonial times the equivalent of today’s US Dollar: an international unit of money. But because the value of a Real was significantly more than many goods, change would be made by dividing or cutting the Real in half or quarters or even into wedges of eighths. An eighth of a Real is one bit, a quarter is two bits, etc. You can still on occasion hear the quarter referred to as “two bits” in the U.S. Because of the proliferation of the coin during the heyday of pirates in the Caribbean, the concept of bits still attends to the image of pirates.

Speaking of coins, the word mite has also come to mean something small. There are several mite words. One refers to a small arachnid, the largest of which grow to be ¼ inch large and the smallest of which are microscopic. But the second mite refers to a Flemish copper coin of such little value that it developed a proverbial use in English to mean a very small amount of money. That is the sense in which John Wycliffe used it in his English Bible translation of the Latin word minutum in Mark 12:42. (It’s also used in Luke 12:59 and Luke 21:2.) The minutum was a translation of the Greek word lepton, which was the smallest coin in use in Palestine during Roman times.  One etylomogy suggests the word mite was a contraction of minutum. One source indicates that a mite was equivalent to six minutes’ work. Not much now, not much then. Just a little bit.

That leaves smidgen, a larger word for a smaller amount. Its first recorded use in English is in 1845, but its etymology is not certain. It could have come from the Scottish word smitch, which referred to both a small or insignificant person or to a small amount. Smitch is found in 1822, so the adoption into English a couple of decades later makes sense. Etymonline.com also suggests it might come from the word smidin, which means small syllable, but I could find no other reference online to smidin.

I find that a bit disconcerting, or a mite odd, or a tad unusual.