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taradiddle: msg#00023culture.language.word-of-the-day
***************************************************************** 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. |
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