“Tut, Tut” and “Tsk, Tsk” Originally Spelled the Same Sound

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Elias from Laramie, Wyoming.

Hi, Elias. Welcome. What’s up?

Well, I had a quick question about a phrase that my grandmother used to say, and I had totally forgotten about it. We were watching some old home videos, and I heard my mom say it. And the phrase is tut-tut, which is what we understood it to be was, you know, no-no, but I hadn’t heard it in so long that when I heard it again, it just sounded so goofy, and I was curious where that comes from.

Tut, tut. What was happening in the video?

I was probably two or three years old, and I was in the way of the camera. And my mom, you know, reached and grabbed my hand and said, tut, tut, which I would assume was just no-no.

Yeah, no-no, just telling you not to do something. That makes good sense.

Yeah. Interesting story behind this. Are you familiar with Tsk, Tsk?

Yes.

So tsk tsk and tut tut are both versions of the sound that you make on your teeth to express disapproval. It’s kind of like a, can you hear that?

Oh, yes.

So what happened is this is kind of a natural sound for English speakers and speakers of other Western European languages to make to show disapproval or something negative. And it’s cultural. It’s transmitted culturally. So it’s not universal to all humans. There are other sounds that other people make in other parts of the world. But this is part of Western culture. And somewhere along the way, that sound was written out into words as tut tut and tsk tsk.

So tut tut and tsk tsk. But they are both written representations of the same sound. Tut tut, for example, dates back to the 1500s. I’m not quite sure how old tsk tsk is, but it’s similarly old. But because they were written as words, they kind of took on their own lives, and then they became pronounced as words.

So now we have these three different ways to express some kind of negative idea that are related to each other, but are a little different. And people are kind of surprised to find that tsk, tsk, and tut, tut originally represented exactly the same sound, because it is really hard to describe that sound with kind of the orthographic tools that we have in English.

That original sound contains what are known as dental violor clicks, which are not typically part of the English phonemic morphological inventory. That is a mouthful. It just means we don’t usually make that sound in English. So tut tut, your grandmother is kind of representing like this centuries of development of this cultural sound in that one video. So she is just kind of like this bullet point or this data point in a history of a cultural way. It’s very interesting to me.

That is way too interesting. I honestly was very curious because, you know, obviously in this world we can Google things, but I thought I’m not even going to have an idea. So my mind was blown. So thank you guys.

Google isn’t as much fun, and frankly, how do you sort through the chaff?

Exactly.

Well, thank you guys so much. I appreciate it.

All right. Take care of yourself.

Thanks for calling, Lise.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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