Sugar tit is a folk name for a baby pacifier, or dummy, that was once commonly made and used in North America and Britain. It was made by placing a spoonful of sugar, or honey, in a small patch of clean cloth, then gathering the cloth around the sugar and twisting it to form a bulb. The bulb was then secured by twine or a rubber band. The baby's saliva would slowly dissolve the sugar in the bulb.
In use the exposed outfolded fabric could give the appearance of a flower in the baby's mouth. David Ransel quotes a Russian study by Dr. N. E. Kushev while discussing a similar home-made cloth-and-food pacifier called a soska; there, the term "flower" as used colloquially by mothers, refers to a bloom of mold in the child's mouth caused by decay of the contents.
As early as 1802 a German physician, Christian Struve, described the sugar tit as "one of the most revolting customs".
Due to widespread availability of inexpensive commercial baby pacifiers and the unpopularity of feeding babies "empty calories", as well as the damage caused to emerging teeth, sugar tits are a rarity today, at least in the United States and UK.
Famous quotes containing the word sugar:
“The sugar maple is remarkable for its clean ankle. The groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)