| 词源 |
hoity-toity. A pretentious upper-class Frenchman a few centuries ago often took the opportunity to literally look down from his haut toit, or “high roof,” on the lower classes, his haut toit becoming through mispronunciation the English hoity-toity, “haughty, pretentious.” Or so goes one theory on hoity-toity’s origins. The O.E.D. claims the word is a rhyming compound based on hoit, “to romp,” now obsolete. By this theory hoity-toity, first recorded as meaning giddy behavior (1668), came to mean haughty by 1830—possibly because the same socialites who were hoity-toity, “silly,” were haughty as well. |