Lydgate, Lyf of Our Lady.
Thrifty. The ‘thrifty’ is on the way to be the thriving; yet ‘thrifty’ does not mean thriving now, as once it did. It still indeed retains this meaning in provincial use; as I have heard a newly-transplanted tree, which was doing well, described as ‘thrifty.’ See ‘Unthrifty;’ and the quotation from Tusser, s. v. ‘Family.’
No grace hath more abundant promises made unto it than this of mercy, a sowing, a reaping, a thrifty grace.—Bishop Reynolds, Sermon 30.
Tidy. This, identical with the German ‘zeitig,’ has lost that reference to time which in ‘noontide,’ ‘eventide,’ and some other compounds still survives.
Seven eares wexen fette of coren
On an busk ranc and wel tidi.
Genesis and Exodus, 2104.
Lo an erthetilier abidith preciouse fruyt of the erthe, paciently suffrynge til he resseyve tymeful and lateful fruit—that is tidi and ripe.—James v. 7. Wiclif.
Tinsel. This (the Old French ‘estincelle,’ a spark) is always now cheap finery, flashing like silver and gold, but at the same time pretending a value and a richness which it does not really possess. There lay no such insinuation of pretentious splendour in its earlier uses. A valuable note in Keightley’s Milton, vol. i. p. 126, makes it, I think, clear that by ‘tinsel’ was commonly meant ‘a silver texture, less dense and stout than cloth of silver;’ yet not always, for see my first quotation.
Under a duke, no man to wear cloth of gold tinsel.—Literary Remains of King Edward VI., 1551, 2.