Etymology and Origins of Wifty

It's the Word of the Day podcast for june seventeenth . I'm Keanna and I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know, and it thinks about the customer more than anything . Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like I can't stop I'm addicted . Start your free trial at Shopify dot com Today's word is Wifty spelled W IF TY. Wifty is an adjective. It's a synonym of the word ditsy. It describes something or someone eccentrically silly or scatter brained. Here's the word used in a sentence from Joy Ride, a memoir by Susan Orlean . When he dreams, he dreams about moving to Wyoming , which he has visited with his family. Sometimes when he talks about this, it sounds as ordinary and hard boiled as a real estate appraisal. Other times, it can sound fantastical and wifty and achingly naive Whence Wifty Wordsmiths have been wondering for a while . The earliest print evidence of Wifty comes from the early twentieth century, though the word was certainly being used in spoken English before that . The adjective suffix why is clear enough, when added to another word it can mean full of as in muddy, having the character of , as in waxy, tending or inclined to, as in sleepy, etc . So what's wift? Well, that element could come from wif i f , which as a noun can refer to a quick puff or sl ight gust of air. A person described by the word wifty might also, if unkindly , be called an airhead , or perhaps the wift is related to waft , w af t