In a Co Wicklow hotel recently, while her mother was making a phone call 10 feet away, a young lady whispered to me that if I bought her a coke she'd give me a kiss. She informed me that she was five, that her mother was a meanie, and that her name was Tiffany. Such precocity couldn't go unrewarded; with her mother's reluctant permission I bought her the coke. I got no kiss, of course.
I wondered about the origin of her name. It seems to be from Old French tifinie (c. 1200) or tiphanie: there are more than 40 variants. The words come from the Latin theophania, applied to the Epiphany. Its Greek origin, theophanie, means the manifestation of God to man.
Not until Holland, the classical scholar, mentioned it in 1601, did tiffany, the dress material, appear in literature. He wrote of "the invention of that fine silke, Tiffanie, Sarcenet and Cypres, which instead of apparell to cover and hide, shew women naked through them".
Tiffany, the sexy material, was a word confined to England; it may have been short for Epiphany silk, but nobody knows for sure. Perhaps it had to do with the sense manifestation; the Epiphany is the feast of the manifestation of Christ to the Magi, and in the Eastern Church, of the baptism of Christ; the word is from the Greek epiphaneia, an appearing.
How did the word became a woman's name? I suppose it was given to girls born on the 6th of January, just as Noel, Noelle, and Nollaig are given to children born at Christmas. The first Tiffany, or Theophana, of note was a Byzantine lady who married a German king, Otto the Second, in 962. She made the name popular in Europe; its chief home was in Armorica, whence, as a grumpy Englishman declared, "William de Coningsby /Came out of Brittany/With his wife Tiffany/ and his maid Manifas/ And his dog Hardigras."
Some sources say that this lassie gave her name to the revealing silk, but there's no proof of that. Another famous Tiffany, whose name is also given as Tiphanie, Theophanie and Epiphanie, was the wife of the Norman Bertrand de Guesclin. She used to predict lucky and unlucky days for her husband; the trouble was that he never read her predictions until disaster happened. Then, of course, he blamed her.
The name is not as popular now as it used to be, young Tiffany's mother, an Englishwoman, told me. A pity.