flit

What flits?

Does a hippo flit?

Does a cow flit? Could a calf? 

How about a ship? Perhaps a little light boat? If it floats, can it flit? Flying fish flit, don’t they?

Our feathered friends, fleet of flight, flap their wings and flit. A hummingbird flits. A sparrow flutters and flits. A crow could flit, perhaps. But a raptor? Can a hawk, a goshawk, an osprey, an eagle flit?

Is there a filter for flitting? What is and isn’t fitting? If you can shoo it, can it flit? Can a cat flit? A rat?

Insects flit, sometimes. Bees may flit. Do butterflies flit, or are they too floppy and chaotic? Ticks never flit, but do mosquitos?

Can your fingers flit? Do they flit when you fillet a fish, or chiffonade a leaf of fresh basil? Do they flit over the keyboard when you type? Have your fingers flitted when they felt felt or fluffed a throw pillow?

Do your eyes flit? Does your glance? Your attention? Your little liquid flicking tongue, licking lips or enunciating lexical items?

The issue is this: formerly, many things flitted. And we flitted things, too. You could flit your boxes, your books, your friends, your cattle; it was nothing more than the act of moving from one place to another. And, intransitively, to make any shift was to flit: you could flit from where you sit, or flit to another home, another job, another life. To flee was to flit.

The trick is that flit is not like, say, flap or flip or flick; it didn’t come about from simple imitative sound symbolism. It traces back through Old Germanic roots and on to Proto-Indo-European and is related to fleet and float and flood and flow and even flutter, not to mention so many words in so many other languages. 

We do, it is true, see a certain similarity of sense in so many of the fl- words, and it’s unsurprising: once enough words with a certain sound gain a sense association, it’s more likely to be inferred with further words. And with flit, the quick sharp sound similar to flip and flick has also likely guided the narrowing of its usage. 

So where, four centuries ago, you could flit your cattle from one farm or field to another, now flitting is just for light, fleet things. A blue whale will never flit anymore, nor will a cruise ship or even, probably, a tour bus. But a motorcycle? Perhaps. A camera drone? Certainly. A clownfish? Why not. Any social butterfly or flibbertigibbet? You bet. You can flit through life, flit through time. But does time flit? Does life? How about the meanings of words?