Today's Word "tittle-tattle"
Idle, trifling talk
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Published in Vocabulary
tittle-tattle \TIT-uhl TAT-uhl\ (noun) - 1 : Idle, trifling talk; empty prattle. 2 : An idle, trifling talker; a gossip.
(verb) - 1 : to talk idly; to prate.
"Both were in their seventies, and like two old parrots they told, in identical words, the tale they had heard so often from their mother...The tittle-tattle of a half-starved countryside that throughout its long winters had nothing but tittle-tattle for amusement." -- Eric Linklater, 'The Dark of Summer'
Tittle-tattle is a varied reduplication of tattle, which derives from Medieval Dutch tatelen, to babble.
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