I was reading Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker essay on child stars (archived) when I got to this passage:
The astonishing young actor known as Master Betty was the prototype of the species. An Irish boy with a stage father, Betty became a sensation in Belfast, at the start of the century, by playing adult roles, then conquered London, where he starred in “Hamlet”—the ironies of the “Players” scene must have been thick in the air—and “Richard III.” A genuine wonder, he was almost certainly one of Charles Dickens’s models for the “Infant Phenomenon” in the Crummles troupe of “Nicholas Nickleby.”
Betty’s story, remarkable as it is, has been told only once, by the acidly entertaining English historian Giles Playfair. Writing in the sixties, Playfair compared Betty to the newly minted Beatlemania, convinced that the new stars would fade as completely as the old. Yet Bettymania was the real thing. “He and Buonaparte now divide the world,” the artist James Northcote wrote to a friend after Betty’s London début. In Stockport, church bells rang to celebrate an extra performance; in Sheffield, “theatrical coaches” were dispatched from the Doncaster races to carry six eager passengers to see him. In Liverpool, the rush for seats was so great that, Playfair recounts, “hats, wigs, boots, and tippers flew about in all directions.”
I stopped reading right there, wondering what the hell “tippers” might be. I asked my wife, but she didn’t know. I googled around and got nothing useful. Finally I decided to find the original of the quote; it wasn’t easy, because it had been truncated without notice (shame!), but here it is, from Playfair’s The Prodigy: A Study of the Strange Life of Master Betty: “hats, wigs, boots, muffs, spencers and tippets, flew about in all directions.” Tippets! That word I was familiar with; a tippet is “A shoulder covering, typically the fur of a fox, with long ends that dangle in front,” and the word derives from Latin tapete ‘cloth (decorative, for use as carpet, wall hangings etc.).’ [Or perhaps not; see ktschwarz’s comment below.] So now you know, and we can join in lamenting the editing failure at the fabled magazine.
And Latin tapete (there are various other forms in Latin) became German Tapete (feminine gender) “wallpaper”, the older neutral form Tapet is practically obsolete (except perhaps for the saying “etwas aufs Tapet bringen”, but my impression is that except for some pretentious journalists nobody uses that). And L tapete (or one of its variants) is also the ultimate origin of German Teppich “carpet”. I think most Germans would be surprised to hear that both words are Latin loanwords.
TIPPET is attested as a surname although rarer in that spelling (in the US, as of 1990) than TIPPETT, TIPPIT, and TIPPETTS, although all three of those are rarer than TIBBETTS. I don’t know that any of those share the etymology of the item-of-clothing. Online sources purporting to explain surname etymologies seem notably worse than online-etymology-explanations in general.
Wikipedia informs me that the musician Keith Tippett (1947-2020) was actually born Keith Graham Tippetts. I don’t know why he found the final -s unsuitable as a stage name.
Good catch. Today I read a fine New Yorker article by Alice Gregory on Hilma af Klint. I do sometimes wonder if Gopnik spreads himself too thin, though I suppose someone might dismiss that too self-defensive.
I’m still interested whether, as Gopnik re-posed, Stanton said Lincoln belongs to the angels or ages.
Corrections welcome.
I don’t know why he found the final -s unsuitable as a stage name.
Keith Tippett changed his name while leading a band called the Keith Tippetts Sextet. It is said that he did so because promoters kept wrongly inserting an apostrophe under the mistaken assumption that it was Keith Tippett’s Sextet and because he decided Keith Tippett Sextet would be easier to say. His wife, the singer Julie Tippetts, has retained the final ‘s’.
@Ian Preston: Thanks. It appears to be a complicated family namewise. Poking around the internet it appears that the 1990’s saw the release of at least one CD credited to Julie Tippetts and another credited jointly to Keith and Julie Tippett. But that one credits its cover art to Inca Tippetts (not Tippett), who seems to be a daughter. And to be fair the front and back cover of the 1976 Ovary Lodge album (scanned images available via the wonders of the internet) does credit him as Tippett and her as Tippetts, as if daring you to question it. And of course to a mass audience she may remain better known for her youthful work as Miss Driscoll.
Wikipedia informs me that the musician …
I thought that was going to reference Michael Tippett, no relation, and needing no change of name AFAICT.
Each may free-associate to the Tippett (or other variant spelling) of his or her own subconscious choosing.
Only now did I focus on the undisclosed truncation hat complained about: apparently the same editors that made tippets into tippers thought their readers would be confused by Playfair’s reference to muffs and spencers.
One Latin root, sundry offspring.
Cambridge Dictionary.
tapete
noun
cubierta de tela u otro material que se coloca sobre los muebles como protección o adorno
runner
Latin America
tejido grueso que cubre el suelo para abrigo y como adorno
carpet
RAE—
tapete
Definición
Del lat. tapēte, y este del gr. τάπης, -ητος tápēs, -ētos, voz de or. anatolio.
1. m. Cubierta de hule, paño u otro tejido, que para ornato o resguardo se sueleponer en las mesas y otros muebles. Sin.:
* pañito, carpeta, cubierta.
2. m. Alfombra pequeña.
@jwb 17/11:18.28
Could all these names (also Tebbit) be from Teba(u)(l)t ex Theobald? I think there is a Tibalt in Shakespeare somewhere.
@pp That’s what The Oxford Names Companion (s.v. Theobald) says (labeling Tippet as a Cornish variant).
@J.W. Brewer: All inside quotation marks, and this from a publication that flaunts its rectitude. Surely this is more problematic than a typo slipping through.
“hats, wigs, boots, and tippers flew about in all directions.”
Surely this is more problematic than a typo slipping through.
Is this the sort of thing that happens when one outsources copyediting and proofreading to ChatGTP?
“Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers” takes on a new elegance with this information.
With its p and its non-initial stress and its general plosive-heaviness, it’s an obvious loanword, but I would never have guessed it’s entirely identical to a Latin i-stem word declined like mare!
There’s a Tybalt in Romeo & Juliet – at least that’s what the spelling has settled on; I don’t know if Shak(e)spear(e) himself also used five other versions.
I guess Diebold is the same; it looks Dutch, though.
Which for the average speaker of Standard German are not typical markers of loanwords.
The above mentioned Oxford Names Companion lists Diepolder as a Low German variant/derivative.
Quoted from Wiktionary:
Wiktionary is *sometimes* better on etymology than professional general dictionaries, but only when it cites sources better than “Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913”. The OED’s etymology hasn’t been updated from 1912, but it disputes the Latin origin:
The Middle English Dictionary, AHD, and Manchester Lexis of Cloth and Clothing all prefer the tip etymology, though qualified with “prob.”, “perhaps” and “speculative” respectively; DSL gives only the tip etymology.
The most common source for p and general plosive-heaviness is probably Low and Central German, and, sure, the average speaker of Standard German lives on the North German Plain or in shouting distance of the middle Rhine and isn’t going to find these things exotic.
Unstressed verb prefixes aside, though, non-initial stress is rare in native words. Forelle, Holunder, Hornisse, lebendig, and I think that’s it. Buchhalterisch sometimes 🙂
I suppose that’s *Dietbold > *Diepold as opposed to outright loss of the *t or not yet devoiced *d (as in Robert).
If you look through Paul’s Wörterbuch you often find that it was often Luther who preferred a Low German form and introduced it into the standard language.
And Goethe told Eckermann about the pronunciation of the actors he had known: “Die Aussprache der Norddeutschen ließ im Ganzen wenig zu wünschen übrig. Sie ist rein und kann in mancher Hinsicht als musterhaft gelten. Dagegen habe ich mit geborenen Schwaben, Östreichern und Sachsen oft meine Not gehabt. Bei diesen entstehen die lächerlichsten Mißgriffe daraus, daß sie in den hiesigen Schulen nicht angehalten werden, das B. vom P. und das D. vom T. durch eine markierte Aussprache stark zu unterscheiden. Man sollte kaum glauben, daß sie B. P. D. und T. überhaupt für vier verschiedene Buchstaben halten, denn sie sprechen nur immer von einem weichen und einem harten B. und von einem weichen und einem harten D. und scheinen dadurch stillschweigend anzudeuten, daß P. und T. gar nicht existieren. Aus einem solchen Munde klingt denn Pein wie Bein, Paß wie Baß, und Teckel wie Deckel.” (Dritter Teil,5. Mail 1824),
They’re still predictable allophones in Saxony, and there are still people in Vienna who just don’t have a fortis [p].