It’s inevitable: after the activity of the holidays (Yuletide and the others, with their themes of nativity and invitation and conviviality with oodles of vittles), in the void of winter, you will look around your living space at the various piled items and feel motivated to titivate. You know, just tidy a bit… spruce it up… satisfy an appetite for prettiness. You have a boost in your attitude. But what about your mid-winter vitality? Are you activated to undertake the titivation? Or will it be vitiated by inertia and the prophylaxis of, say, sitting and writing about it?
Speaking of which. Nice word, titivate, isn’t it? It bespeaks not just a certain activity but a certain context as well. It’s not mere tidying, not mere accessorizing; it’s touching up the finer points of prettiness or aesthetic aptitude. It’s doing les petites choses to a t. So this word, which trips on the tip of the tongue, is quite apt.
And not only in sound. For, you see, just as when titivating you may take little things and match them in new and apposite ways, with titivate the speakers of the English language picked some pretty bits and put them together. But we’re not one hundred percent sure which bits came from where – or just what inspired what.
Here’s the thing. Wiktionary gives the etymology of titivate as “A modification of the earlier spelling tidivate, perhaps based on tidy + -vate, on the pattern of words such as cultivate and renovate.” And the citations you can find in Green’s Dictionary of Slang certainly support that: the first one, from 1823, is from a dictionary that says “Tiddyvated — i.e. made tidy, or neat.” But the reality is not quite so tidy, as you will find if you have access to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Oh, the OED also speculates that its origin is “humorously < tidy adj. + ‑vate (in e.g. cultivate v. and activate v.).” But its first citation is from 1705, and it reads “He says he is shaved enough, and has his Whiskers tittivated to his content.” And its second is from 1785 and reads “I wish I could get a barber to titivate me up a little.” It’s not until an 1834 citation that we see the spelling tidivate. And we may recall that while in American English the pronunciation of titivate and tidivate would typically be indistinguishable, in most British English this is not the case. So it would seem that the derivation is a bit less tidy… or anyway those earlier citations are not timely. (And yes, that’s a pun: tidy originally meant the same as timely, just as tide’s original meaning is ‘time, season’.)
There is a titillating further suggestion in the OED: usages where the sense is evidently “excite or stimulate agreeably or pleasingly.” The influence of titillate can be seen in those – but the earliest among them is from 1833, so it’s more likely a matter of misconstrual of meaning by analogy with a similar-sounding word. There’s no suggestion that titivate started with that.
So what do we do? What can we do? Not everything can be sensibly tidied, at least not without doing damage. It is as when, in a fit of titivating, you spy a tchotchke on a shelf that doesn’t seem to fit its place. You could toss it, perhaps, but why? It’s pretty enough, and you’re kind of attached to it. So you arrange things around it and leave it as it is, and tell your friends, “Not sure where we got that, but it ties the room together.”
Sesquiotica 