German tailors, dried apple slices, and veal cutlets have one thing in common: they are all known by names that derive from schneiden, a German verb meaning to cut. From schneiden, German derived its word for tailor: Schneider, literally meaning cutter, a word that also became, in the Middle Ages, a surname for many people in Germany who made and sold clothes for a living (similarly, the English word tailor also means cutter, deriving as it does from the Late Latin taliare, meaning to cut, which in turn developed from the Latin talea, meaning a cutting). From schneiden, German also derived the word schnitzel, meaning a slice, a name bestowed on the slices of veal used to make, among other things, wiener schnitzel, a cutlet coated with egg and bread crumbs; in English, schnitzel was first referred to by name in the mid nineteenth century. Closely related to schnitzel is schnitz, applied in German to the dried slices of apples used to make certain pastries and ham dishes. When it was introduced to English in the early twentieth century, schnitz, which in German is singular, was spelt snits, which in English sounds and looks plural; as a result, English speakers eventually created a new singular form, snit, to refer to just one apple slice. Of course, another snit exists in English, the one that means foul mood, as in, “He got himself into a real snit.” The origin of this foul-mood snit is unknown, apart from the fact that it emerged in the 1930s; however, it is possible that this snit was somehow inspired by the apple-slice snit, just as pickle for some reason came to mean quandary, as in, “He got himself into a real pickle.”