My daughter just came in from the garden, her hands covered with mud, and told me she’d been “chitting” the seed potatoes.
“Chitting?” I said and ran not for a towel but to my Oxford English.
Chit (n) an impudent or arrogant young woman. Definitely not my daughter. ORIGIN late Middle English, whelp, cub, kitten.
Nothing about root veg.
Chit (vb) cause a potato to sprout by putting in a light place. ORIGIN 17th c. from dialect: chit, a shoot or sprout.
Mystery solved.
But that “kitten” bothered me. A sprout of a cat? I get it. Sort of.
Look what happened when I turned to the entry on Kitten:
Kitten ORIGIN late Middle English kitoun from an Anglo-Norman French variant of Old French chitoun, diminutive of chat.
Absolutely nothing about Sprouts. But more than a hint of a link in that OF word to the LME, “chit”.
The meaning we attribute to words is all in our heads. Homo sapiens created words while chimpanzees didn’t because our brains, voice boxes and ears evolved differently.
“Iconic” words (Homo erectus) evolved into “strings” (Neanderthalensis) which turned into complex language.
When we found we could control fire, we consoled our existential fear by telling each other stories into the night.
And that kitten with its muddled Old French/Middle English ancestry?
The boats bobbing back and forth across the English Channel from Roman times must have carried the odd ship’s cat or two to eat the rats. The sailors must have chatted with the locals on both sides of the water.
So, now, no-one will ever be able to tell if it was an English or a French child who first cried, “Chit! Chitoun! Kitten!”