Virginia Woolf submitted an article to Tit-Bits at the age of eight. It was rejected. The experience might have hurt her. With her sister Vanessa and brother Thoby she had built an imaginary world in their family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, modelled upon Tit-Bits. Writing as an adult about George Eliot she said: ‘She is as easy to read as Tit-Bits.’ In Flush, her imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, she used the common noun: ‘They tempted him with caresses; they offered him titbits; but it was useless.’
There was nothing rude about Tit-Bits (beginning in 1881 as Tit-Bits from all the interesting Books and Newspapers of the World, and becoming the unhyphenated Titbits only in 1973 and closing in 1984), or about the common word titbits.
Kingsley Amis, in a letter to The Spectator in 1995, attributed to ‘fastidiousness’ the rise of tidbit in preference to titbit (which would make it like cockerel or rooster displacing cock in British English).
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