Language Matters | How lewd military slang gave rise to ‘chitty bang bangs’
Ian Fleming’s flying car came later. The original phrase referred to the permission slip soldiers needed to leave the barracks to visit local brothels
In offices across Hong Kong, staff are writing out chits – of appointments, deliveries, food or drink consumed – to record payment due. The word “chit” and the earlier but now obsolete term “chitty” come from the Hindi chitthi, meaning note or letter, which comes from the Sanskrit chitra (“spot”, “mark”). This was how notes delivered by servants in British India were referred to; the Anglo-Indian term entered British usage in the mid-18th century, and is still commonly heard. In India, its greatest frequency occurs as “chit fund” – a savings scheme involving several subscribers, each of whom, in turn, are eventually entitled to the prize total.
The apparent connection (think: note, voucher, money) with that South Asian merchant class, the Chettis, and the hybrid Chitty communities (Tamil Cetti, Citti “mercantile class”) – descendants of male Chettis who married and settled in Ceylon, Malacca and Singapore in the 15th century – is perhaps specious. Word associations lie elsewhere.
Military slang does get lewd: in the British Army “chitty bang bang” apparently came to refer to the permission slip that soldiers needed to leave the barracks – to visit local brothels; a first-world-war barracks song includes the bawdy lyrics “chitty chitty bang bang”. Chitty Bang Bang was the name given by eccentric Count Louis Zborowski to the series of four celebrated aero-engined cars he built and raced in the 1920s – though it is not determined if this was based, as a joke, on those song lyrics, or was onomatopoeic for the engine’s start-up noises. Among the race spectators was a young Ian Fleming, who was inspired to later write a children’s book about a flying car that fights organised crime – its title was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.