A fitting word

Language is there for us to use (and abuse), so there's no point getting upset about its evolution.
When you earn your living by putting words together, you develop a sensitivity about the emotive and provocative power of words. As a sideline, you usually acquire a highly subjective taste for odd and unfamiliar words that grab your attention.
In a recent column I used the word "a conniption fit", and within five days, I had 12 letters wanting to know what "a conniption fit" is. Is it an old-fashioned medical term? Is it slang? What is its origin? And to my shame, I had no answer.
The word has been in my brain since I was a child, and I had conjured up this image of an immense tantrum, when your chest and throat are nipped so tight with rage or disappointment that your voice pitch rises to a shriek, your face turns red and you are close to being incoherently shrill.
I suppose words like "anger" and "temper tantrum" could have done the job, but somehow "a conniption fit" sounded more colourful and dramatic, just as "discombobulated" sounds a lot more interesting than "disconcerted". It's more or less a style choice, but in this case I found myself wondering whether the word was just a piece of made-up, private, family jargon.
So, I went digging and found that "a conniption fit" does exist. It has origins and literary provenance, which let me off the hook, but finding its origin and true meaning was another matter.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary declares the origin to be unknown. A couple of the dictionary websites claimed that it derived from the Yiddish "kanipshin fit" to denote a tantrum, but nobody could come up with any clear and concrete origin.
Then I went to Podictionary.com, the site with that wonderful "Word of the Day" feature. On the day I was writing this, the Word of the Day was "gun", something everyone knows, but where did it come from? It seems to have derived from a French word "gonne", which means "barrel", and it was somehow attached to the weapon because of the gun barrel.
But I digress. The "conniption fit", says this site, "first showed up in English around 1833, and was defined in the 1848 Dictionary of American English as 'a fainting fit', a common and harmless 19th-century reaction to stress. Today, unfortunately, the conniption prone are more likely to sue than swoon."
Then I turned to www.word-detective.com who blamed it all on a woman named Aunt Keziah. In the early 1800s she lived in the town of Downingville in New England and was very excited by the prospect of a visit by President Andrew Jackson. She spent much of her hard-earned cash to create a bedroom fit for a president, but he never arrived, which resulted in her conniption fit.
The story was written by a man called Seba Smith, a newspaper humourist who used the slang and dialects of the New England backwoods in his stories, much as Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce did, and he seems to be the first man who used the words in published work.
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable suggests "conniption" might have derived from "convulsion", while etymonline.com says that it is perhaps related to a rare English word, "canapshus" (which I have never heard), and it denoted "angry confusion". Tony Thorne, in his Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, does not even attempt to find a proper origin for it, but observes that the phrase "conniption fit" occurs more commonly in Australia and the US than in Britain.
That's all very interesting, and everyone seems to agree that "conniption" is a genuine word, but nobody knows quite where it came from or when it took its form and spelling. That's about as useful as asking someone in Joburg, "Where is Pretoria?", and getting the answer, "Up north".
So, to the 12 eager correspondents who wanted to know what a conniption fit is and where it got its name, I simply don't know. I think I first heard it from my great-aunt Sophie, who seemed to me to be older than the pyramids when I was a child, but I liked the phrase and have used it ever since.
But that's the point about language. It's yours to do with as you wish. I get so annoyed when I hear people lamenting that e-mails, SMSes and other forms of techno-communication are destroying language and that we are losing "the youth" to technological illiteracy. It reminds me of a fusty old teacher who always said: "If it's good enough for the dictionary and Queen Victoria, it's good enough for you."
What absolute rubbish. Popular slang will sometimes leave its traces, but language will take what it needs from it, and move on. Imagine if I had listened to her; what a mingy creature I would have been. Nonetheless, if she were to read this column, she would almost certainly go into a conniption fit.
