Marmy Fluffy Butt, Elongated

Those attentive readers who are familiars of Marmy Fluffy Butt will gasp at the virtuosity she allowed the camera to witness, and then, without the usual *ack*::*ack* contrarian fanfare, capture.

Since her feline version of IBS has been brought under control, she's in love bug stage, and can often be found attached to my left hip.  She challenges Buddy the Outrageously Large Maine Coon for Manor leadership about every other day, and has inflicted several warning slashes upon little Dobby's face when he moved in for an innocent traditional DNA check.

She's full of herself, in other words.

We like this version of a long, slinky Marmy Fluffy Butt -- she is not hiding out with abdominal pain, she is, in fact, stretching to new lengths, she winks at me and cracks the worst kind of jokes, then *ack*::*ack*s to her heart's content!

Should Marmy enthrall you, these two old posts describe how she got her and her reign since:
Wednesday's CatCam -- Full of Woe and Wednesday Morning Blahs.






Please allow me to share my etymological discovery of the day!  One cannot observe the magnificence that is Marmy without eventually entertaining the term "hoity-toity."  Most often, her attitudinal fluffiness causes a mental stutter, leaving you psychically mumbling, "hoity, hoity, hoiteeee!"  Ah, but... anyway! The term "hoity-toity" actually made snopes.com!

"Hoity-toity" begs for a hoity-toity origin.  And so was born an etymology with an accent, from an older world with smaller cobbled streets, and where the habit of looking down on people whilst sipping on a thick, caramelly espresso from the comfy vantage point of a limestone or bluestone or concrete tile perch:  "The term "hoity-toity" comes from the French words haut toit, meaning 'high roof.'"

Berlitz called it this way:  "The expression 'hoity-toity,' for ; pretentious,;  comes from the French haut toit — high roof — from which the pretentious looked down on the literally 'lower' classes."

In swoops snope to do what snope does:

Origins:   In common English speech, "hoity-toity" is an adjective used with disdain to refer to the pretentious, those who put on a show of pretending to possess refinement and sophistication (similar to "highfalutin"). So, some people naturally assume that such an unusual expression, referring to the cultured, must itself have a cultured origin — in this case a French-language reference to the (literal) upper class, people who looked down upon others from atop their high roofs (i.e., haut toit). 

"Hoity-toity" has nothing to do with French (or the French), however. The expression comes from our penchant for creating rhyming phrases such as "loosey-goosey" or "helter-skelter," and in this case its base is "hoit," an obsolete 16th century verb whose meaning is "to play the fool" or "to indulge in riotous and noisy mirth." ("Hoity-toity" was more commonly used to describe those who engaged in thoughtlessly silly or frivolous behavior before it became more of a synonym for "pretentious.") Attempts to find the word "haughty" to be an ancestor of "hoity-toity" are equally specious. 

I thought of mourning the loss of a lovely etymology.

Then, thinking of the Queen who prompted the whole half-arsed search, I realized how much closer she is to silliness -- *ack*::*ack* and a wink, followed by a seductive, round-bellied flop and presentation of one white-fuzzed, pink-skinned abdomen in need of rubbing -- than to serious haughtiness.








© 2013 L. Ryan