Smidge, Tidge, and Shimmy: Small Moves and Their Origins

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Terry from Fort Worth.

Hey, Terry.

Hi, Terry. How are you doing?

I’m good. How are you guys?

Super duper.

What’s going on?

Just some words came up.

I use here at work, it’s smidge and tidge.

And I didn’t know if you guys were able to do the shimmy.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, I can give you a little bit on all three of those.

What’s the context here?

When are you smidging and shimmying and tidging?

From the OR stretcher, you know, we have them move on to the OR bed.

I work back here in the OR.

So you’re in a hospital?

So I tell the patients, I said, okay, just kind of move over just a tidge or a smidge.

And my dad used to tell me forever that tidge was not even a word, so I don’t even know.

I’ve been using it for years, so I don’t even know where I came up with it.

And then so when I say shimmy, I said, just shimmy on over here.

And sometimes the room, when I say shimmy, they go, shimmy, shimmy, cocoa pop, shimmy, shimmy pop.

So the room kind of pops out.

So anyways, it’s just kind of goofy stuff like that.

That’s awesome.

I know that song.

I don’t know where I picked it up, but I knew that song as a kid.

Yeah, I’ve heard it too.

I’ve not heard it in a, are you in a hospital or some kind of medical facility then?

Yeah, okay.

Okay.

Just a little surgery in small inpatient hospital.

We do surgeries and stuff like that.

Okay. And Terry, when you use these words, do your patients seem to understand what you’re saying?

Yeah, but they’re pretty much already medicated.

They’re already sedated, so we have to have them move from, you know, the bed.

They come into the OR room to the OR bed.

And so to get them there, I just say, okay, just kind of move over just a smidge or a tidge or shimmy over.

Well, I can help you with all those. We can help you with all those.

You could use your own language and nobody would notice is what you’re saying.

Well, it’s funny you said that is because my friend sitting here, she says, I have my own language.

And she’s like, yeah?

Oh, you do.

Terry has her own language.

I’m like, oh, okay.

Well, is it just Terry’s language?

No, not those three words anyway.

Smidgen is the longer form of smidge.

So smidge is just a certain name of smidgen.

And smidgen probably comes from a Scots word.

So Scots is this amalgam language spoken in Scotland, a little bit of English, a little bit of Gaelic.

It’s a very distinctive tone to it.

And there are a ton of Americans who have Scots heritage, so we’ve got a lot of that language, too.

There’s the word smidge, which also means just a little bit in Scots, so that’s probably where smidgen and smidge come from.

There are a ton of related words, variety of spellings and pronunciations, but generally that’s the history.

Tidge is probably a mix of smidge plus either touch or tad.

So if I tell you to move over a tidge, it’s tad plus smidge, which still just means a little bit.

And it’s got a long history as well, 50 to 80 years, depending on which dictionary that you check.

Shimmy has got a great story, though.

Shimmy was a dance in the early 1900s, a very suggestive erotic dance that involved the hips moving from side to side in a certain kind of undulation of the form to such a degree that it was banned throughout the country in a lot of different municipalities.

New York had some laws about it.

Wyoming had some laws about it, a bunch of other places.

And so when we talk about a shimmy, we are often talking about moving our body in a way that’s very similar to that dance.

Mm—

Yeah.

Well, they can’t do that very well being medicated and go to the other bed.

No.

Well, Terry, thanks for your call.

And do us a favor.

If you do have your own language, we want to hear more of it.

Give us another call sometime, all right?

Okay.

Thank you so much.

All right.

You take care now.

All right.

Hi to your coworkers.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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