Tizzy, as in Fraud, Not as in Rushing Around

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Barb from Boston.

Hey, Barb.

Hi. And I’m calling because in a previous life I had, I was a banker on Wall Street and I worked for a British bank.

And we had a situation one day where we got some mail and it landed on my desk.

And it was from a Nigerian prince.

And it was a wonderful offer for the bank.

And everybody laughed.

And I was told, oh, that’s a tizzy.

You have to send that to the tizzy hunting office.

I thought it was a joke, but apparently this bank in London had an office that was called the tizzy hunting office.

And so I found the envelope that came in and sent it off and didn’t hear anything more about it.

But I always wondered what in the world the tizzy hunting was.

I never had another instance of it happening there.

And over the years, I’ve always mentioned tizzy hunting when I’ve seen a scammer or fraud and everybody looks at me strangely.

Then I figured, you know, you probably would be able to figure it out for me.

And nobody at the office really ever said more to you about tizzy or tizzy hunting?

I was new and no, and they didn’t explain it.

They just said, that’s a tizzy.

And that was it.

And because we didn’t, I was learning a lot and there were other things going on.

We never had another instance of it.

And I looked it up in the directory and we actually did have a tizzy hunting office.

Really?

How about that?

I want to see their stationery.

Wow.

That would be so cool.

It’s funny that you should mention the stationery, Martha, because that is one of the scams that tizzy hunters are on the lookout for.

Sometimes people will write innocuous letters to banks hoping to get, I mean, it’s less common now, hoping to get something back on official bank stationery that they can then reproduce to make scam letters on stationery.

Huh. Interesting.

This was in the days before email.

It was in 1981, so it was many years ago.

Well, I have a little bit to tell you, and then I have a bit of speculation.

So I’ll tell you the things that I know for sure.

There is a mention in the Dictionary of the Underworld by lexicographer Eric Partridge.

He says a Tiz worker is a confidence man.

That’s a con man from the 1920s.

And that tiz, T-I-Z-Z, is short for the low slang tizzle, meaning a swindle or a fraud.

And I’m certain that these are connected to what you’re talking about.

And then there’s old Cockney slang of tizzy, meaning a sixpence.

Sometimes tizzy is spelled T-I-Z-Z-I, sometimes T-E-I-Z-Z-Y.

And there’s no indication that connected, but I do believe that they are.

And I am certain that this is a British term.

Now, the speculation here that I have is it may be connected to a speech given by Winston Churchill in 1909.

And I’ll tell you why.

He was giving a speech about, you know, at this point, Churchill is already 35 years old.

He was already a big figure in politics and famous enough to have his first wax figure at Madame Tussauds.

And he was referring in this speech to taxing foreigners.

And he used the term tizzy hunting just as you used it.

How about that?

What he was talking about was that the government was going to spend large sums of money to get taxes from foreigners only to get back a little bit of revenue for all of its effort.

And what he meant was that they were going to get these tizzies, these sixpence from these people when they were spending so many millions of pounds.

He thought he was making an important point, but his audience didn’t understand.

It was new slang to them, so they just kind of sat there and didn’t respond.

And so I’m wondering if this tizzy hunting is the same tizzy hunting that you’re talking about, this idea of going after money from foreigners.

I do think it was part of, so the bank was based in London, and the tizzy hunting office was part of the international side because the bank was an enormous retail banker in Britain, but we were on the international side.

And so that might make some sense.

It definitely fell out of flavor.

They don’t use it anymore, apparently.

No, I only found it.

Otherwise, I found tizzy used in the way that you use it to refer to fraud outside of this dictionary of the underworld, only in one other source.

It’s really just not that common.

But I got to tell you, I’ve added this to what I call like my permanent hunt list, where anytime I come across a new resource, like a great new reference book or a great new website, I will look for this and just see if there’s something new that I can find.

Well, that solves that.

Because whenever I see some new fraud, I say, oh, that’s a tizzy, and everybody stares at me.

Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for calling.

Well, thank you.

Thank you, Barbara. I really appreciate your call. Take care now.

Well, thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

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