Word of the Day for Sunday September 28, 2003
titivate \TIT-uh-vayt\, transitive & intransitive verb:
To smarten up; to spruce up.
It's easy to laugh at a book in which the heroine's husband
says to her, "You look beautiful," and then adds, "So stop
titivating yourself."
--Joyce Cohen, review of To Be the Best, by Barbara Taylor
Bradford, [1]New York Times, July 31, 1988
In The Idle Class, when Chaplin is titivating in a hotel
room, the cloth on his dressing table rides up and down,
caught in the same furious gusts.
--Peter Conrad, [2]Modern Times, Modern Places
_________________________________________________________
Titivate is perhaps from tidy + the quasi-Latin ending -vate.
When the word originally came into the language, it was
written tidivate or tiddivate. The noun form is titivation.
Usage: Titivate is sometimes considered colloquial and is
often used for humorous effect. Be careful not to confuse it
with [3]titillate.
[>>Charles<<]
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