Mitty in its archaic British sense referred to the storm petrel, a small seabird known for skimming ocean surfaces during storms. That ornithological sense is entirely obsolete; today mitty almost exclusively carries the cultural meaning from James Thurber's 1939 short story character Walter Mitty — a hapless daydreamer who escapes mundane reality through elaborate fantasies. Calling someone a mitty implies they are prone to self-aggrandising fantasies or delusions about their own abilities or importance.
He was a proper mitty — spent half the briefing staring into space, probably imagining himself leading a hostage rescue.
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(UK, archaic) The storm petrel.
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The vocabulary of software engineers, AI researchers, and anyone living in a terminal or on GitHub — from LLM to MCP, CORS to vibe coding, agentic to enshittification.
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