A Tip from the Tea Shop — the History of Tipping
This week’s word is tip, with thanks to an etymology tip I found in “Oranges and Lemons” by Christopher Fowler (wonderful detective series set in London, awash with historic tidbits). His character mentioned that if you visit Twinings Tea Shop on the Strand, the oldest in the world, you’ll find a wooden box with the gold printed initials TIP on it, standing for “To Improve Promptness”. If you wanted your tea a bit faster you’d drop a few pence in it from which we get the word tip. Naturally this piqued my interest.
Considering tip is a short word, it has a rather long and complex history. For a start it has two noun versions and four verbs. As a noun is can be the absolute point or top of something, that arrived around 1400, or shortly afterwards it gained a meaning as a light blow or tap.
The verb forms include;
- (c. 1200, probably from German sources) to strike suddenly
- (c. 1300, probably from Norse sources) to knock something down or askew. This gives us tipping the scales, tipping point, and to tip one’s hand in card-playing
- (c. 1300, probably from Norse sources) to adorn with a tip
The final verb is the one we’re interested in today — to tip, as in to give an additional sum of money as a thank you for good service. Tip entered English in roughly this sense around 1600s as “to give a small present of money to”. It wasn’t associated with service at this point. It could be a parent giving a gift to a child, for example. The first record of giving a tip as a gratuity dates to 1706 — remember that date, I’ll be coming back to it.
However there is a large question mark over the whole “To Improve Promptness” idea. For a start there’s a fair bit of debate over what TIP stands for. In the 1909 book “Inns, Ales and Drinking Customs of Old England” by FW Hackwood, he reckons it stands for “To Insure Promptitude”. His book was reviewed in the same year by “The Athenaeum” and the reviewer poured scorn on Hackwood’s theory, implying it was a popular folk etymology without basis in truth. By 1946 TIP was being translated as “To Insure Promptness”. The variations don’t mean the acronym idea is false, but it definitely raises a warning flag.
Now let’s travel back to the Strand in London. This is where you will find the Twinings Museum, beside their tea shop. I have a huge fondness for small museums. They’re easier to visit than the vast labyrinths of the Louvre and other behemoths and are often run with a real passion. I think a wonderful way to spent my later years would be to travel to tiny museums around the world and this one has now gone on my “I want to visit” list.
Thomas Twining founded his tea shop here in 1706 (yes, there’s that year again) and has traded on the same spot ever since. Their website tells me that amongst their tea exhibits is “a non-descript wooden box labelled TIP, which is an acronym for ‘to insure promptness’; patrons of coffee/tea houses would drop a penny into the box to encourage quick service — the origin of tip “.
While I have my doubts about tip being an acronym, I suspect Thomas may have been the first well-known beverage seller to provide a tip box for his customers to add an extra gift for staff on top of their required payment. The word had been around with the meaning of small gift since the 1600s and as “an addition on top” since the 1300s. However I’m sure, regardless of the origin, anybody working in service industries will be very happy to receive a tip as shops and other establishments begin to re-open across Ireland today.
In case you’re curious, the idea of a tip-off being a bit of private information comes from the same roots and it dates to the 1800s. Perhaps such tidbits were first traded in Twinings tea-shop?
Grace
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Revised for Medium but originally published at http://wordfoolery.wordpress.com on May 17, 2021.
