TTFN

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2007)

ttfn redirects here. For the book by Lauren Myracle, see ttfn.

TTFN is an initialism for a colloquial valediction, 'ta ta for now', based on 'ta ta', an informal 'goodbye', approximately equivalent to 'bye bye', 'see ya' or 'laters'. The expression came to prominence in the UK during the Second World War.

TTFN is still used occasionally in ham radio as an ending to a transmission but was brought into popular use in the UK in 1941 in the weekly radio comedy ITMA by the character Mrs Mopp. From 1939, initialisms, previously rarely used except by the military, were heard more frequently by the British public. ITMA satirized them by coining TTFN, a "pointless" initialism (no easier to say than the phrase on which it was based) and using it as a catchphrase.^{[citation needed]}

'Ta ta for now' caught on with the British public, so much so that it was often uttered by dying people as their last words.^[1]

Thirty years later, Paul Winchell, following the suggestion of his British third wife^{[citation needed]}, Jean Freeman, improvised the redundant phrase "TTFN, ta ta for now!" as a signature phrase for the (originally British) character Tigger in the Disney films based on A. A. Milne's book The House at Pooh Corner. This, in a world now accustomed to them, popularised worldwide a word originally coined to make fun of initialisms.

It was also a phrase used regularly in the later series of the BBC comedy Only Fools and Horses by Del Boy and at least once by Corporal Jones (the butcher) in Dad's Army.

It has been used in various U.S. television programs including Batman and The Simpsons.

In episode 40 of Goodnight Sweetheart, Gary's wartime wife Phoebe Sparrow says to his present day wife Yvonne Sparrow "TTFN" when she returns to the 1940s from 1998.

[edit] References