Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: In a dither, a flutter, a tizzy

With nights getting longer and Halloween approaching, here around the homestead we're all in a dither over getting our decorations up and preparing for the holiday season (but really, do the stores have to throw up Christmas displays in early October??).

Perhaps you, too, are in a dither, or maybe in a flutter or even a tizzy.... all of which pretty much boil down to "a state of tremulous agitation." Now, if you had to guess, would you think dither, flutter or tizzy is the oldest version? And which would you guess is the most recent?
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I guessed, and...
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...I was wrong! Which is why it's always good to check these phrases out and not (ahem) assume.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer, in a flutter dates from the mid-1700s, whereas the noun dither is from the early 1800s and goes back to the Middle English verb didderen (to tremble). In a tizzy, however, is relatively new, dating from about 1930 and is of "uncertain origin."

The mystery surrounding tizzy sent me searching for more, and I turned up this interesting tidbit about the word on World Wide Words:

....Tizzie Lish [was] a character played by Bill Comstock on the radio show Al Pearce and His Gang. The show began on KFRC in San Francisco in 1929 but moved to NBC in 1933, where it continued until 1947. Tizzie was usually all of a dither and she would proceed to dictate very bad recipes, insisting that listeners find a pencil and paper to write them down. ... Our word tizzy for being in a state of nervous excitement, agitation or worry is recorded first in the US in 1935 and almost certainly comes from — or at least was popularised by — the radio character. 

I actually found a 1940s 30-minute episode of Al Pearce and His Gang on YouTube, right here. There is also an audio recording of a  five-minute audition of Tizzie Lish, courtesy of rand’s esoteric otr (with otr being short for "old time radio"). If you want a little more about Tizzie Lish, here is an entire post about the character and Bill Comstock, the radio actor who played her.

Finally, in a strange sort of roundabout connection to the world of radio, the word dither turns out to have a very specific definition in the technical world of audio and video. According to Wikipedia:

Dither is an intentionally applied form of noise used to randomize quantization error, preventing large-scale patterns such as color banding in images. Dither is routinely used in processing of both digital audio and video data, and is often one of the last stages of mastering audio to a CD.

I imagine you are probably in a dither (in the non-audio sense) after all this nattering, so I'll let you go!

A dithering David (at least, in the technical sense)
By David by Michelangelo; dithered by User:Gerbrant using own software - cropped from Image:Dithering algorithms.png, Public Domain, Link