The alt.usage.english FAQ   

• "titsling"/"brassiere"

  (Word Origins)
  
  "Brassiere" is first recorded in a Canadian advertisement of 1911, and in the U.S. Index of Patents for the year 1910 (published in 1911). Dictionaries derive it from obsolete (17th century) French _brassiere_ = "bodice", from Old French _braciere_ = "arm protector", from _bras_ = "arm". (The French word for bra is _soutien-gorge_, literally "support-throat".)
  
  In the southern U.S., a bra is sometimes called a "tit-sling". This has an obvious derivation.
  
  Wallace Reyburn, to whom Thomas Crapper owes his current fame, wrote a later book describing a lawsuit over rights to the bra, fought from 1934 to 1938 in New York, between a German-born designer, Otto Titzling (1884-1942), and a French-born designer, Philippe de Brassiere. Martin Gardner, in _Time Travel and Other Mathematical Bewilderments_ (Freeman, 1988, ISBN 0-7107-1925-8), p. 137, says: "The book by Wallace Reyburn _Flushed with Pride: The Story of Thomas Crapper_ does exist. For many years I assumed that Reyburn's book was the funniest plumbing hoax since H. L. Mencken wrote his fake history of the bathtub. [...] Reyburn wrote a later book titled _Bust-up: The Uplifting Tale of Otto Titzling and the Development of the Bra_. It turns out, though, that both Thomas Crapper and Otto Titzling were real people, and neither of Reyburn's books is entirely a hoax."
  
  On its AOL message board, Merriam-Webster Editorial Department wrote: "dull though it may be, all the available etymological evidence indicates that the word derives from the French 'brassiere' [...]; there are many examples of the use of 'brassiere' in the women's apparel sense throughout the 19th century -- in French. [...] Given the word's history and that country's language heritage, it is not surprising that the first occurrence of the "brassiere" in English comes from Canada. [...] We can find no verifiable evidence that anyone named either 'Titzling' or 'Brassiere' had anything to do with the origin of the term."
  
  Source: [Mark Israel, 'Word Origins: "titsling"/"brassiere"', The alt.usage.english FAQ file,(line 4244), (29 Sept 1997)]
  
  
  
  

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