I won’t say “the tooter the sweeter” is the oddest entry I’ve ever encountered in the OED, since I’ve seen some doozies, but it certainly took me aback:
‘The sooner the better’: used as a comparative of toot sweet adv., typically to intensify a preceding use of the positive form.
1917 Punch 5 Dec. 389 (caption) Tommy (to inquisitive French children): ‘Nah, then, alley toot sweet, an’ the tooter the sweeter.’
1919 H. M. Kramer With Seeing Eyes viii. 143 So when one heard the whistle of a bomb he ‘hit the ground’, to use a soldier expression, ‘toot sweet—and the tooter the sweeter’.
1960 N. E. Jacob Search for Background iv. 54 There’s a message from your dad, to go to Mr Oswald’s office as soon as you get here. As we used to say in the first war—the tooter the sweeter.
2000 Scotsman (Nexis) 2 June 16 Greetings, mine honest tapster..furnish me toot sweet—and the tooter the sweeter—with a pint of your finest industrial-strength sheep dip.
I mean, it’s a jolly phrase, but since when has the OED been including jolly phrases in its lexicon? Why isn’t it s.v. sweet? But I’m glad to know about it, and I thought I’d pass it on.
Shouldn’t that be s.v. suite?
The tooter the sweeter is based on the English jocularism toot sweet ‘at once, immediately, right away’, which is an eggcorn of the French adverbial phrase tout de suite ‘idem’. If the OED does not cross-refer its entries for “sweet” and “the tooter, the sweeter,” it should.
If “toot sweet adv.” is a headword then that’s what “the tooter the sweeter” should be s.v. But headwords hardly matter any more, since OED3 is a website with a searchbox and will probably never be sold in printed form.
Since when has the OED been including jolly phrases in its lexicon? Since pretty much ever, I’d guess; after all, “tace is Latin for a candle” was entered in 1910. The only question is whether this should be ranked as a headword or as a sub-entry.
Obviously toot sweet, adv. and the tooter the sweeter are cross-referenced to each other. The former was entered in 1986, with the latter as a sub-entry; it was promoted to headword in the June 2014 revision, which commemorated the centenary of World War I. Yes, I think they’ve made the case that this was established in English via the war: as they note under toot sweet, it was found “Only in representations of French speech before the First World War”, and only afterward starts showing up as something said by English speakers. And in the citations quoted in the post, the first two are directly war-related.
@Hat But I’m glad to know about it, and I thought I’d pass it on.
Does that mean you’d not heard the expression before?/Is it generally not known in U.S.?
It’s been a stock phrase in my family since forever. (My grandfather was in the trenches in Flanders in WWI.)
Why isn’t it s.v. sweet?
Because its ‘sweet’ is not cognate with ‘sugary’, but from the eggcorn, per @M.
@Frans Shouldn’t that be s.v. suite?
No, because ‘suite’ in English doesn’t have the sense ‘following’ or ‘quickly’ — even though English has borrowed the word.
If “toot sweet adv.” is a headword then that’s what “the tooter the sweeter” should be s.v.
Quite right.
Since when has the OED been including jolly phrases in its lexicon? Since pretty much ever, I’d guess; after all, “tace is Latin for a candle” was entered in 1910. The only question is whether this should be ranked as a headword or as a sub-entry.
I expressed myself poorly; of course I meant as a headword.
Does that mean you’d not heard the expression before?/Is it generally not known in U.S.?
Right both times. Well, I can’t speak for all USians, but I’m guessing it’s a lot less common here.
I’ve heard and seen “toot sweet” and never considered it British-as-opposed to-American. But I’ve never met “the tooter the sweeter” until now; if I had come across it I would have assumed it was the kind of wordplay that gets rediscovered/reinvented from time to time, rather than something created in WW1 and passed on continuously since then.
Mercy buckets for this.
I’m with mollymooly: Very familiar with toot sweet, never heard of the tooter the sweeter until now.
I too was familiar with “toot sweet”, and never thought of it as particularly Brit, but it would certainly make sense as a specimen of Parleyvoo from WW1.
I was traumatised as a child by the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which features at one point everyone’s favourite Englishman Dick van Dyke singing a song about a confectionary called “Toot Sweets.” However, it looks as if Roald Dahl may have been to blame (Ian Fleming seems to be innocent.)
I like the review snippet from Time quoted by WP: the film’s “eleven songs have all the rich melodic variety of an automobile horn.” Ouch.
Yeah, me too on “should be a sub-entry”.
I tried to get a list of headwords that are classified as “phr.”, but the search function was not cooperative; the best I could do was a list of entries with “phr.” in the full text, which includes a lot of irrelevancies. (There is a function to limit by part of speech, but “phr.” is not one of its options.) After looking over the results, I’m starting to think that “phr.” is worthless as a part-of-speech label. The part-of-speech label is supposed to describe how a lexeme interacts with other lexemes to form sentences, whereas “phr.” describes its origin, not its function. Most of the entries that the OED labels as “phr.” are foreign phrases that were taken into English whole, but that doesn’t mean they don’t play grammatical roles in an English sentence: e.g. in “the principle of cui bono”, “there was a quid pro quo”, the Latin phrases act as nouns, and many dictionaries go ahead and label them as such.
What’s labeled “phr.” looks like a wastebasket category, which I’d sort into several piles:
1. Oh come on, these are *words*: avast (etymologically from a phrase in Dutch, but it’s a word in English), jig-a-jig, tac-au-tac, resurgam, snafu.
2. Better as sub-entries: bags I (this is a use of the verb bag); ’smatter of fact (no difference from as a matter of fact except in degree of casualness, should be in that entry); feast or famine (why not under famine?)
3. OK as entries, but do your job and figure out a part of speech for them: if tit for tat, matter of fact, good morning, and Q.E.D. are all labeled with parts of speech and not “phr.”, then there’s no reason why they can’t do the same for FYI, pour encourager les autres, etc.
4. Some are predominantly used as if sentences: in vino veritas, no can do, plus ça change, verb sap. These might have a claim to still be called “phrases”, or perhaps they should be called “interjections”?
5. Bits of eye dialect: nemmine for “never mind”. I don’t know what to do with that.
OK, that’s about where I give up with the wastebasket, but I think a lot of it can be sorted out more neatly.
I have never heard either version of the expression (simple or comparative). More generally, I think specific mocking versions of French phrases are much more a part of British culture than American. Britain has a long and continuing history of rivalry with and proximity to France, which has made mockery of “the frogs,”‘ including their ridiculous accents, a longrunning motif in British media and society.
I don’t think it’s mockery of the French: more self-mockery.
I do this sort of thing myself, and I am not merely highly Francophile but buy into the whole langue et civilisation françaises shtick to a degree that makes me a worthy quondam habitué of the AOF* as was. I like to think of myself as an évolué.
* https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrique-Occidentale_fran%C3%A7aise
A phrase about “the tooter” in our household would be about something entirely different. Generally it would be my kids calling me that and me denying it.
I have a couple of Cajun microwave cookbooks from probably the 70s called “Tout Suite” and Tout Suite 2.” I suspect the French phrase is fairly common in parts of Louisiana where English is still flavored by bits of French.
I grew up in Texas in the 50s, and I have a vague memory of my parents using “toot sweet” and “the tooter the sweeter” when I was small, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t heard it in decades until tonight.
Toots Sweet was the name of the juke joint singer who didn’t know nuthin’ about no murder because all he knew was Two Sisters cocktails so pour him another one in Angel Heart.
The phrase is familiar to me despite never living anywhere near Louisiana. Maybe war movies or something Hogan would have said to a mock a British officer too busy trying to escape to realize something more important was going on at Stalag 13?