It's the Word of the Day podcast for December 4th.

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Today's word is hoity-toity, spelled as two hyphenated words,

H-O-I-T-Y-H-T-Y-T-Y-T-Y.

Hoidy is an adjective.

Someone or something described as hoity-toity may also be called

snooty or pretentious. Hoity-to-ty people appear to think that they are better, smarter, or more

important than other people, and hoity-to-to-ty places and things seem to be made for those

sane people. An informal word, hoity totoity, is a synonym of the words

pompous, fancy, and hyfalutin. Here's the word used in a sentence from vulture by Jen Cheney.

Most summer Olympics show beach volleyball on a beach. This year's spikers will play in front of the Eiffel Tower because they can.

And just in case equestrian events aren't hoity-toity enough, the 2024 dressage and jumping

will unfold at the Palace of Versailles. In modern use, the word hoity-toity is used almost exclusively to describe someone who's got their nose stuck up in the air or something suited for such a person.

But for over a hundred years, hoity tooty was used solely as a noun, referring to thoughtless and silly behavior.

The noun originated as a rhyming reduplication of

the dialectical verb, hoit, meaning to play the fool. Accordingly, as an adjective, hoity-toity

was originally used to describe someone as thoughtless or silly, as when English writer W. Somerset

Maum wrote in his 1944 novel The Razors Edge,

...