Patootie is American slang that has led a double life. In its original sense, usually as ‘sweet patootie’, it means a sweetheart or an attractive young woman. Later it became a jokey euphemism for the backside, which is the sense most speakers now hear in ‘a pain in the patootie’ and the emphatic ‘you bet your sweet patootie’, meaning ‘you may be absolutely certain of it’.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘patootie’?
‘Patootie’ surfaces in American slang in the early twentieth century. Green’s Dictionary of Slang finds ‘sweet patootie!’ in use as a mild exclamation as early as 1907, and by the end of the First World War the word had settled into its best-known role. Etymonline dates the ‘sweetheart, pretty girl’ sense to 1919, noting that in early use the word almost always appeared as ‘sweet patootie’.
That pairing points to the standard account of where it comes from. The word is generally taken to be a playful corruption of ‘potato’, with ‘sweet patootie’ standing in for ‘sweet potato’. Calling a loved one a vegetable is no odder than calling them honey or pumpkin, and the parallel form ‘hot patootie’, echoing ‘hot potato’, supports the idea. The dictionaries hedge with a ‘perhaps’, and the pet name ‘tootsie’ may have helped shape the sound, but no rival explanation has any real evidence behind it.
The word belongs to the same jazz-age stratum of American slang as the bee’s knees. Green’s records ‘hot patootie’ for a sexually attractive woman from 1922, and the word found its way into the music of the period and after: Sidney Bechet recorded a number titled ‘Sweet Patootie’, and the Library of Congress holds a ‘Sweet Patootie Blues’ played by the boogie-woogie pianist Albert Ammons.
The buttocks sense came later. Green’s earliest evidence for it is from 1942, and it also circulates in the clipped form ‘patoot’, as in ‘horse’s patoot’. This is the sense most Americans now hear in ‘you bet your sweet patootie’, which follows the familiar pattern of wagering a body part on one’s certainty, as in ‘you bet your boots’ and ‘you bet your sweet bippy’. With ‘sweet’ and ‘hot’ so readily attached to both senses, it is not always possible to say which one a given speaker intends.
The word’s survival owes a good deal to showbusiness. Richard O’Brien wrote ‘Hot Patootie - Bless My Soul’ for The Rocky Horror Show, belted out by the biker Eddie and, in the 1975 film, by Meat Loaf. The rhyming endearment ‘cutie patootie’ keeps the affectionate side of the word alive.