See fuddle-duddle on Wiktionary
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"etymology_number": 1,
"etymology_text": "From fuddle, after fuddy-duddy, but development of meaning unclear. Perhaps from the interjection coined by Pierre Trudeau (see next etymology).",
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"To depart, to be off."
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"etymology_number": 2,
"etymology_text": "There is an example of the phrase's use in the early 1940s, in \"Mother Finds a Body\", by Gypsy Rose Lee: \"...when [he] asks me where I was on the night of so-and-so, I'll tell him to go fuddle his duddle\".\nHowever the expression fuddle-duddle is attributed to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, former prime minister of Canada, who according to some sources said it in parliament on 16 February 1971 and repeated it when pressed by television reporters about using profanity in respect to members of Parliament (Canadian House of Commons).",
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"ref": "1971, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, (Please provide the book title or journal name):",
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"type": "quote"
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],
"glosses": [
"Fuck! Fuck off!"
],
"id": "en-fuddle-duddle-en-intj-RjnC6vSL",
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"etymology_number": 1,
"etymology_text": "From fuddle, after fuddy-duddy, but development of meaning unclear. Perhaps from the interjection coined by Pierre Trudeau (see next etymology).",
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"type": "quote"
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Download raw JSONL data for fuddle-duddle meaning in All languages combined (3.1kB)
This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-01-18 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-01 using wiktextract (e4a2c88 and 4230888). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.