Don't ask us to speculate on why parents of young children pass along such word questions, but we've recently been presented with the following words to investigate: tantrum, conniption, and hissy. (来源：英语交友 http://friends.englishcn.com)

We've talked before about hissy. That chiefly Southern and southern Midland synonym of tantrum is believed to have made its way into our lexicon through a shortening and altering of hysterical. The noun hissy dates back to the 1930s. The phrase hissy fit didn't appear until another three or four decades later.

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Conniption—meaning "a fit of rage, hysteria, or alarm"—is a century older than hissy. Its first known appearance in print dates to 1833. Tantrum—a fit of bad temper or burst of ill humor—is still another century older; tantrum's print debut dates to 1714.

Don't have a fit—or, you know, get upset in some way—but the histories of the words conniption and tantrum remain unknown. Various theories for how conniption sprang into our language include a corruption of the words corruption or captious and perhaps a borrowing from Yiddish. Theories on how tantrum became a word include tracing it back to tantra (that Sanskrit word literally means "warp") and associating the -rum in tantrum with the -rum or -drum that appears in doldrums. Although none of these suppositions has a shred of substantiation, we suppose there are worse ways to wait out a tantrum than by dreaming up etymologies. (来源：英语资料下载 http://download.englishcn.com)