logo       

taradiddle: msg#00023

culture.language.word-of-the-day

Subject: taradiddle

*****************************************************************
Why settle for one word of the day? Check out all the hot
new words by subscribing to Merriam-Webster Unabridged.
http://www.merriam-websterunabridged.com
*****************************************************************

The Word of the Day for May 24 is:

taradiddle \tair-uh-DIH-dul\ noun
1 : fib
*2 : pretentious nonsense

Example sentence:
The story was criticized by business writer Don Larson
as "the worst collection of falsehoods, fabrications,
misrepresentations, deceptions and just plain old-fashioned
taradiddle that I have ever read."

Did you know?
The true origin of "taradiddle" is unknown, but that
doesn't mean you won't encounter a lot of balderdash about its
history. Some folks try to connect it to the verb "diddle"
(meaning "to cheat"), but that hasn't been proven and may turn
out to be poppycock. You may hear some tommyrot about it coming
from the Old English verb "didrian," which meant "to deceive,"
but that couldn't be true unless "didrian" was somehow suddenly
revived after eight or nine centuries of disuse. No one even
knows when "taradiddle" was first used. It must have been long
before it showed up in a 1796 dictionary of colloquial speech
(where it was defined as a synonym of "fib"), but if we claimed
we knew who said it first, we'd be dishing out pure applesauce.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.





<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>
Google Custom Search

News | FAQ | advertise