Tantrum, conniption, and hissyWord for the Wise October 05, 2006 Broadcast Topic: Tantrum, conniption, and hissy Don't ask us to speculate on why parents of young children pass along such word questions, but we've recently been presented with the following words to investigate: tantrum, conniption, and hissy.
(来源：老牌的英语学习网站 http://www.
2hzz.
com) We've talked before about hissy.
That chiefly Southern and southern Midland synonym of tantrum is believed to have made its way into our lexicon through a shortening and altering of hysterical.
The noun hissy dates back to the 1930s.
The phrase hissy fit didn't appear until another three or four decades later.
Conniption—meaning "a fit of rage, hysteria, or alarm"—is a century older than hissy.
Its first known appearance in print dates to 1833.
Tantrum—a fit of bad temper or burst of ill humor—is still another century older; tantrum's print debut dates to 1714.
Don't have a fit—or, you know, get upset in some way—but the histories of the words conniption and tantrum remain unknown.
Various theories for how conniption sprang into our language include a corruption of the words corruption or captious and perhaps a borrowing from Yiddish.
Theories on how tantrum became a word include tracing it back to tantra (that Sanskrit word literally means "warp") and associating the -rum in tantrum with the -rum or -drum that appears in doldrums.
Although none of these suppositions has a shred of substantiation, we suppose there are worse ways to wait out a tantrum than by dreaming up etymologies.