Following up on yesterday’s “Fedora days” posting, about hats — the fedora, trilby, pork pie, bowler, and homburg — Benita Bendon Campbell produced this wonderful photo:
A carefully staged re-creation of a scene from the 1930s — with Denver councilman Kevin Flynn in vintage costume. Wearing a bowler hat, known familiarly as a titfer.
From GDoS: noun titfer (also titfa) abbr. for tit for tat ‘a hat’. First cite from 1932 “Stick yer ‘tit fer’ on yer ‘Uncle Ned'”, that is, stick your hat on your head. (In the working-class British context, this would almost surely have been a bowler hat, as in Flynn’s picture.)
GDoS has the Cockney rhyming slang tit for tat ‘a hat’ from 1925, in a list of soldier and sailor slang (and also from 2002, in AuE, for “a rat, i.e. a non-trade unionist”).
