Touchy, tetchy, testy

I recently learned the word “tetchy”. It means irritable or easily annoyed.

My first reaction was mild horror—had I been misusing the similar-sounding “touchy” all these years? Flashbacks to my past malapropisms: “flush out” for “flesh out”, “precedence” for “precedent”, so on.

But it turns out touchy, tetchy, and testy not only sound alike and look alike, but they also mean roughly the same thing.

• Touchy – Implies emotional sensitivity or defensiveness, often about a specific subject. (He’s touchy about his work being criticized.) (pronounce)
• Tetchy – A more British usage, meaning easily annoyed or bad-tempered. (He’s been tetchy all morning for no reason.) (pronounce)
• Testy – Suggests impatience or irritability, often due to annoyance or provocation. (She gave a testy reply when asked the same question again.) (pronounce)

Apparently these are what linguists call paronyms. In this case the words are near-homophones (“soundalike”), near-homographs (“lookalike”), and also near-cognates (“meanalike”). A linguistic hat trick!

How deep is this coincidence? Do they come from a common root? Maybe.

• Touchy - Perhaps derived from tetchy in combination with sensations of touch. (etymonline)
• Tetchy - Perhaps from Middle English tatch “a mark, quality,” derived via Old French from Vulgar Latin *tecca, from a Germanic source akin to Old English tacen. (etymonline)
• Testy - Comes from Middle English testif (meaning headstrong or impetuous), which likely derives from Old French testu (meaning stubborn or strong-willed). This, in turn, comes from teste (head), from Latin testa (pot or shell, metaphorically meaning head). (etymonline)

TIL. Perhaps someday “techie” will join this cluster.

“He’s been techie all morning—grumbling about outdated JavaScript frameworks.”

😬