Hoity-toity is an interesting expression. It nowadays describes a person who assumes superiority, `airs', huffiness. This was what John Keats took it to mean when he wrote, in Cap and Bells, `See what hoity-toity airs she took.' Dryden would have glossed the expression as `petulant'; in his day, however, hoity-toity, a noun, also meant giddy behaviour, romping, frolic, flightiness. L'Estrange, a witty observer of the social scene, complained in 1668 about `the widows I observed Clanking and Jigging to every Tune they heard, and all upon the Hoyty-Toyty, like mad wenches of fifteen'.
Nowadays it seems, only in England's north country will you find hoity toity used as L'Estrange used it; as an adjective it is `an epithet applied to giddy, thoughtless young females', according to a Northamptonshire dialect glossary.
As to origin, it seems that the expression is from hoit, a verb (the toity bit is merely a reduplication). To hoit means to engage in riotous and noisy mirth, according to Oxford. Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare's pals, have `Hark my husband he's singing and hoiting' in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Rose Macaulay in her anthology The Minor Pleasures of Life gives us an anonymous poem from 1675 which describes Diana's virginal followers hunting the stag: `A light-foot Host, green-kirtled all they came/And leaped, and rollickt, as some mountain Streame/Sings cold and ruffling thro' the forest glades;/ So ran, so sang, so Hoyted the Moone's Maids.../ Thus, the winds wantoning their flying Curles,/ So rac'd, so chas'd, those most Delighfull Girles.' (Note the seventeenth century pronunciation of stream which has survived in rural Ireland).
But where does hoit come from? Probably from hoyden, a rude, ignorant man, a clown, a boor. The word is not found in English before Shakespeare's time, and even he doesn't have it; his contemporary, Thomas Nashe, is credited with introducing the word into literature. Milton wrote, `Shall I argue of conversation with this hoyd'n?
But where does hoyden come from? Probably from a word found in both German and Dutch, heide, which means health. And healthy those frolicsome women were who hoited through English literature in the seventeenth century.
So, hoity-toity is an expansion of the word hoit first applied to frolicsome, `Delightfull Girles,' afterwards altered to become an expression of petulance and of airs and graces. A shy girl from Bruff, Co Limerick, wrote to ask me about it.