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Back to a week of marching down the alphabet with Green's Dictionary of Slang, though those of you who can math may be squinting at me: our next letter is T, and that means there's 7 more entries. Spoiler: it'll be a week-plus of words, to round things out. Which is a lot to get through, so time to get it started with:
tabby - n., an old woman.
This slang sense is old, though there's also WWI Australian slang (now rather dated) that applied it to any woman regardless of age. How this came to be is a long one. The original tabby was a plain silk taffeta cloth, especially with moiré finish, which became fashionable in the 17th century. The name of the pattern was applied to the striped cat. The name of the cat was applied to old women who keep cats, then generally to old ladies. Backing up, we got the name for tabby silk from French tabis, from Old French atabis, from Medieval Latin attabī, from Arabic 'attābī, after al-'Attābīya, a suburb of Baghdad, literally “the quarter of (Prince) ʿAttāb,” where it was made. Taffeta, another kind of silk, is also from al-'Attābīya, only passed through Persian instead.
Bonus word: tosh3
---L.
tabby - n., an old woman.
This slang sense is old, though there's also WWI Australian slang (now rather dated) that applied it to any woman regardless of age. How this came to be is a long one. The original tabby was a plain silk taffeta cloth, especially with moiré finish, which became fashionable in the 17th century. The name of the pattern was applied to the striped cat. The name of the cat was applied to old women who keep cats, then generally to old ladies. Backing up, we got the name for tabby silk from French tabis, from Old French atabis, from Medieval Latin attabī, from Arabic 'attābī, after al-'Attābīya, a suburb of Baghdad, literally “the quarter of (Prince) ʿAttāb,” where it was made. Taffeta, another kind of silk, is also from al-'Attābīya, only passed through Persian instead.
Bonus word: tosh3
---L.
