I’ve been enjoying the BBC TV series Last Tango in Halifax, a show which regularly sends me to the dictionary in order to decipher certain inscrutable British-isms, the latest being “don’t get all shirty birty (?) with me.”
Oxford Dictionaries online defines shirty as an informal adjective which means: irritable; querulous, i.e., ‘don’t get annoyed or shirty on the phone’.
Etymonline has only this to say:
shirty adjective: "ill-tempered," 1846, slang, probably from shirt (n.) + -y (2), on notion of being disheveled in anger.
But where does shirty come from? And berty or bertie, is that merely decorative rhyming slang?
Best Answer
Here's a question that deals well with the 'shirty' part. Meaning and origin of “Get someone's shirt out”
Yes, in Britain and I imagine other places it is common (especially with children) to use mild insults that rhyme with a proper name, e.g. Silly Billy.
It's not rhyming slang. A suitable example of rhyming slang for 'shirty' might go as follows:
"No need to get Wooster about it."
The listener is supposed to recognise the well-known fictional character Bertie Wooster and then extract the rhyme from Bertie to make shirty.
Note that, as far as I know, that isn't currently used. It was made up by me as an illustration of how rhyming slang works.