The phrase "a tic of" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a habitual action or a minor, involuntary movement or behavior that someone exhibits.
Example: "He had a tic of tapping his fingers on the table whenever he was deep in thought."
Alternatives: "a quirk of" or "a habit of".
Posts about Loudon Wainwright III have become a tradition — anyway, a tic — of this blog.
The word is, more and more often, just a kneejerk, a tic of false piety and blind worship.
The remark had rankled, because it seemed to imply "a stitch of judgment, a tic of abnormality, the threat of the Other to an ordered life".
By Hendrik Hertzberg May 23 , 2012Posts about Loudon Wainwright III have become a tradition — anyway, a tic — of this blog.
(Also, thanks to a tic of her natural speech, invaluable for her onscreen persona, Schumer sounds drunk even when she's not).
(This was a tic of Skousen's; he later defended the Mormon policy of denying the priesthood to blacks with a pamphlet called "The Communist Attack on the Mormons").
Total ion current (TIC) chromatograms of the modern pine soot samples with different sampling methods: (a) TIC chromatogram of PS 1, (b) TIC chromatogram of PS 2. Chromatographic peak assignments are shown in Additional file 6: Table S1.
The girl across the aisle was so startled at my cry of grief and astonishment that she put down a tic instead of a tac.
Peak assignments of the spectra were supported through an analysis of a TiC bulk sample of known stoichiometry (1 1) and a TiO2 thin film of known stoichiometry (1 2).
In a life-drawing class taking place in a classroom away from the museum's galleries, the teacher's stream of chatter seems like a nervous tic of embarrassment, a verbal veil to conceal the models' nakedness.
Reports validating a TIC origin of ECs in other cancer types have yet to emerge in the literature.
