We were chatting the other day with Maureen and Watto, and something came up where I said, "It's tit for tat."
"What's the origin of that, I wonder?"
"Perhaps it's come from 'this' for 'that'," Maureen suggested.
That sounds logical, but I wanted to see what the oracle said.
Some sources indicated that Maureen was on the right track, but there was another I found worth reading. It contends that it's a variant of "tip for tap", as recorded c. 1466:
"Strokis grete, not tippe nor tapp."The change to "tit" and "tat" made its first recorded literary appearance in 1556:
"That is tit for tat in this altricacion [altercation]."
 |
| Source |
I didn't know that, but then I'm a baby-boomer, and he was most famous for his keeping Britain a little bit cheerier during that awful conflict a few years before I was born.
On a more serious note, I've always felt that Christianity's ideal of turning the other cheek has certain merit. While the religion as it's been practised over the last two thousand years has many horrendous things to answer for, that ideal is an advance for western civilisation compared with the 'tit for tat' so emphatically expressed in the Jewish and Islamic texts (and in the Old Testament of the Bible). "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
Gandhi echoes the same sentiment as the New Testament Christian dictum with his saying, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." Not to retaliate was explicit in his doctrine of ahimsa (non-violent non-cooperation), used with great effect against the British.
Even so, there is very little evidence that Christians practise or have ever practised the ideal, but I'm not surprised by this. I am also convinced that turning the other cheek simply cannot be applied to everything. It wouldn't have worked against some of the world's great dictators, who can only have been restrained by violent resistance.
In this respect, the Taoist approach is the most sensible, and I wrote an ANZAC Day story in 2012 about that.
Yet it can be applied with good effect in other ways. There are times when turning the other cheek seems to resulted in a better outcome; or at least its derivatives of compassion, tolerance, acceptance and forgiveness have. In some circumstances it's the only way to move on and find some peace, hard as that can be to achieve. I have several examples of that, but I won't go further with them here.
"Tit for tat," eh? And here was I, with my schoolboy mind, hoping to unearth something much more vulgar.
I grew up in the 50's and 60's with a Dad who'd successfully returned from fighting with the Australian Army as a Signalman in the Middle East. It goes without saying, if he hadn't, I wouldn't, after all, be typing this right now!
ReplyDeleteThe point is, because of our Dad's love of anything British, my brother, sister and I didn't realise for ever so long, that a "hat" was a "hat" - and NOT a "titfer". It took some playground taunting to convince me of our family's linguistic folly. This was one amongst many, which I've inadvertently passed down to my own children.