Word of the Week – Tootles

This one is a special request from my daughter, who came across it in a book. 😃

So, tootles. Being a 90s tween/teen, I grew up hearing this word as “goodbye” (or maybe it was toodles? Hard to say, as apparently it never appeared in writing, and it has no entry in any dictionary I can find…And my kids, being children of the 2000-10s, think of Toodles as a character on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, so…)

But in fact, tootles is from the 1820s as “a frequentative of toot.” Now, first of all, I’ve never noticed another word described as “a frequentative of.” Spellcheck doesn’t even think “frequentative” is a word, LOL. But it just means exactly what you’d think–“when it happens frequently.” So tootle is when you toot frequently upon a horn or flute, for example.

Interestingly, and the use that grabbed my daughter’s attention, is that it later came to mean “to drive or move along in a leisurely fashion.” I can’t find a particular date on when that came into use, but she had encountered a sentence where the characters were tootling along in their car, which apparently struck her as hilarious.

So there we have it! Happy Monday!