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Chris -- 2018-04-11
The derivation of feisty caught me completely by surprise and is worth quoting in its entirety (Online ED): “1896, Amer.Eng. from feist “small dog,” from fice, fist (Amer.Eng., 1805) “small dog;” short for fysting curre “stinking cur,” attested from 1520s, from M.E. fysten, fisten “break wind” (mid-15c.); related to O.E. fisting “stink.” The 1811 slang dictionary defines fice as “a small windy escape backwards, more obvious to the nose than ears; frequently by old ladies charged on their lap-dogs.” Cf. also Dan. fise “to blow, to fart,” and obsolete English askefise, lit. “fire-blower, ash-blower,” from an unrecorded O.N. source, used in M.E. for a kind of bellows, but originally “a term of reproach among northern nations for an unwarlike fellow who stayed at home in the chimney corner” [OED].
Feisty has lost all connection to small windy curs and especially to corner-shrinkers and now means fiery, sparky, spunky, plucky, frisky, and … quarrelsome. Fightsy is a eggcorny way to get the same message across.
Game tutorial – Nurse armed with plague grenades
what we have here is a fightsy little chick who will leave you cursing her name
Game board
I’ve lost horses just by them being overly fightsy and going off to do battle with monsters when my back is turned.
Biker women
The women on this forum can get real fightsy over talk like this
Mexico news comment
You sound like a pretty hot and fightsy girl..
Silent movie review
our Dorothy is a high-spirited, fightsy spitfire with a will of her own – she vows she will NOT marry Sir Malcolm if he is plain.
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Good one. A common eggcorn, to judge by the Google hits. There are more hits under the spelling “fightsty.” And a lot of web pages with “fighsty.” The latter could just be a misspelling, but it is possible that the spelling of the long i sound in “fight” has exercised some influence on the orthography.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Excellent. I’d’a thought that Lakritz had already hoovered up every insta-classic like this one, but you keep proving me wrong.
What I especially like about “fightsy” is that it’s just a bit, well, cutesy—as if the person in question is as likely to play aggressive footsie with you as they are to bop you one.
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What I especially like about “fightsy” is that it’s just a bit, well, cutesy—as if the person in question is as likely to play aggressive footsie with you as they are to bop you one.
Yeah. Exactly.
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Also, this is one of the relatively rare cases where an eggcorn may be born from a metathesis. Lovely, really.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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