A chum of mine in the Mother Country wrote, of old car shows, "One of the main attractions for me used to be rummaging through the boxes of old, rusty tools but we noticed more and more of the stalls were stocking 'Made in Taiwan' rubbish tools, plus the usual plastic tat."
Tat?
Tat is a language spoken by Jews in the Urals.
TAT is an acronym for the Thematic Apperception Test, a psychological measure in which subjects tell a story about a picture, from which the person administering the test may deduce the subject's projections.
TAT is also an acronym for the Trans-Activator-Gene -- a gene in the AIDS virus which compels the host cell to reproduce components of the virus.
TAT is also also an acronym for Trans-Atlantic Telecommunications -- a sort of phone line laid under the ocean in 1956.
TAT is also also also an acronym for turn-around time.
There's a verb named "tat" which describes a process by which infinitely-patient people are able to produce lace.
"Tit for tat" is an expression meaning to retaliate in an equivalent fashion, usually blow for blow, and is supposedly a corruption of "tip for tap" which has something to do with knights bashing on one another.
None of these seemed to represent my correspondent's usage of tat ... as something plastic which looked like a tool but was less desireable than old rusty metal ones. As so often happens, this is a cross-pond difference, yet another Anglo-American linguistic booby trap.
The British definition of tat, when used in this manner, is an object which is tacky, cheap, vulgar, tasteless, sleazy, inelegant, of poor quality or shoddy.
> cross-pond difference
Compare this to the art of tatting:
http://www.bartleby.com/61/83/T0058300.html(cue: enter Helen USL, bearing needles….)But surely you use the word tatty on that side of the pond, don’t you Father Steve?
tatty
ETYMOLOGY: Probably from
tat, a rag, shabby person.
http://www.bartleby.com/61/90/T0059000.html
Folks in the USA will use the adjective "tattered" to describe a person in worn-out clothing. Not so much "tatty", methinks. Tatty may be a Britishism.
ah, interesting variations. Thanks, and tata :)
tatty may be a Britishism
Indeed it it. Somebody told me once that "seedy" was a good North American equivalent - something gone to seed, past its best. I do like the use of "tat" for cheap ware. There's a possibility for it linked with "tawdry", as in Tweety Bird at a market saying "I tot I taw a tawdry tat!" 
There's a possibility for it linked with "tawdry"
Methinks the derivation of "tawdry" is from Saint Audrey. The story told in the Church of England is that the saint had a throat condition which required her to wrap a scarf around her neck. At Saint Audrey's fairs, held in honour of the old girl's memory and example, cheap jewelry (e.g. necklaces) were sold of the sort that one could wear for the day and then discard. By contraction, they were referred to as "tawdry."
If this turns out to be folk etymology, I will be only mildly embarrassed, because it makes such a lovely story in any event.
this etymology has widespread support, although non-church sources differ slightly in telling of Audrey's malady; here's Quinion:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-taw1.htmW3 has this under "tawdry lace": that she died of a throat tumor inflicted as a punishment for her
fondness for necklaces -- a less lovely version of the story.
There are no canons of hagiography of which I am aware but, if there were any, I would think that a good one would be to opt for the more lovely version of any pious legend. Mere historicity is for the unimaginative.
Mere historicity is for the unimaginative.
Or either for those interested in precision and accuracy, one.
Mere historicity is for the unimaginative.
Or either for those interested in precision and accuracy, one.
Ack--'fraid I qualify on both those counts. What's historicity, please?
Historical accuracy, fact.
Historicity arises from the (sometimes outlandish) notion that the actual facts of history can be accessed and known with the same sort of certainly available to scientific measurements. When its pursuit is applied with rigor to fable, legend, myth, poetry, saga, and ancient hagiography, it largely misses the point.
The marvelous old stories about Saint Joseph of Arimathea are illustrative. Joseph appears in the New Testament and was likely a living, breathing, actual human being. There is a certain historicity to that part of his story.
But Joseph also figures in certain apocryphal writings, penned subsequently to the Gospels, and their historicity is very much in question.
Still later legends have it that St Joseph was sent to Britain by the Apostle Philip to Christianize the Island. He carried with him a staff carved from the True Cross. He landed in the British west country with twelve disciples and planted his staff in the ground and the Glastonbury Thorn grew from it. At the direction of the Archangel Gabriel, they build a daub and wattle church upon which, later, the great Benedictine abbey of Glastonbury is built, where King Arthur is buried.
As E.A. Freeman says, in Avalonian Quest, "We need not believe that the Glastonbury legends are records of facts; but the existence of those legends is a very great fact."
Ah; thanks. Thus the reason why all the debates arising from "The DaVinci Code". Your explanation also reminded me of something I saw on television (Discovery Channel, I think), about the Alvarez Asteroid Theory: a geologist was saying that the earth can be read like a book (facts, in other words); and that Alvarez Jr. or Sr. looked at a thin layer of dirt between Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks and found a much higher concentration of iridium than would normally be expected. Further examinations revealed the same finding in that layer all around the world. Therefore it seemed to be a fact that a huge asteroid hit the earth with such an impact that its iridium spread throughout the atmosphere, falling back to earth in this one thin layer, in which there were suddenly no fossils. So--I guess they "read" the earth and came up with this "fact", which sounds like historicity to me if I understood you correctly.
Quaere: Are historicity and facticity synonymous? coextensive?
are historicity and facticity synonymous? I suspect one is a sleeper community ("city") of the other. Is facticity a word?
Is facticity a word?I get 28,700 googlits. Answers.com has a definition for it. Where's your bar set for wordicity?
http://www.answers.com/facticity&r=67
Is facticity a word? it's even in the OED. But so is factitious which points in the opposite direction..