Since the mid seventeenth century, scrumptious morsels of food have been called tidbits, a compound that derives from two words, one of them having an obvious origin, the other one not. The obvious one—bit—simply derives from the same source as the word bite: a bit is literally a piece bitten off (although the computer bit, the name of a tiny unit of information, derives from the first letter of binary and the last two letters of digit). The word tid has a more problematic origin. Until recently, it was thought to be an old dialect word meaning nice or delicate, the idea being that a tidbit is a nice bit of food; the trouble with this explanation is that the word tid did not emerge until a hundred years after the appearance of the word tidbit, suggesting that it was derived from tidbit and not the other way around. Accordingly, a better explanation of tid is that it derives from tide. Before the fourteenth century, when it came to refer to the ebb and flow of the sea, the word tide simply meant time: in fact, time and tide derive from the same source, an Indo-European word meaning to divide. This time sense of tide persists in the archaic words yuletide and Christmastide, and was used throughout the Middle Ages in conjunction with religious holidays such as Eastertide, Whitsuntide, and Shrovetide. Because of the celebratory nature of such holidays, tide eventually came to be synonymous with feast, and any morsel of food remaining after a religious feast came to be known as a tidebit, later corrupted to tidbit. Tidbit remains the usual spelling and pronunciation in North America, but in England titbit is more common, the change in form occurring as people confused the word tid with the word tit; the tit in question, however, is not the vulgar one that means breast, but rather the tit that means small, a word of Scandinavian origin. This tit occurs in compounds such as titmouse, the name of a creature that, despite its name, is not a small mouse but a variety of small bird. The titmouse has, of course, been a source of titillation for generations of British school boys, but only because the bearded tit—a small-billed marsh bird whose head-feathers resemble whiskers—is less familiar.