"fuddle-duddle" meaning in English

See fuddle-duddle in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Interjection

Audio: En-us-fuddle-duddle.ogg [US]
Etymology: 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". However 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). Head templates: {{en-interj}} fuddle-duddle
  1. (euphemistic, originally Canada) Fuck! Fuck off! Tags: euphemistic
    Sense id: en-fuddle-duddle-en-intj-RjnC6vSL Categories (other): Canadian English, English euphemisms
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Etymology number: 2

Verb

Audio: En-us-fuddle-duddle.ogg [US] Forms: fuddle-duddles [present, singular, third-person], fuddle-duddling [participle, present], fuddle-duddled [participle, past], fuddle-duddled [past]
Etymology: From fuddle, after fuddy-duddy, but development of meaning unclear. Perhaps from the interjection coined by Pierre Trudeau (see next etymology). Head templates: {{en-verb}} fuddle-duddle (third-person singular simple present fuddle-duddles, present participle fuddle-duddling, simple past and past participle fuddle-duddled)
  1. To depart, to be off.
    Sense id: en-fuddle-duddle-en-verb-4QvMmraS
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Etymology number: 1

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for fuddle-duddle meaning in English (2.9kB)

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  "etymology_number": 1,
  "etymology_templates": [],
  "etymology_text": "From fuddle, after fuddy-duddy, but development of meaning unclear. Perhaps from the interjection coined by Pierre Trudeau (see next etymology).",
  "forms": [
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      "form": "fuddle-duddles",
      "tags": [
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    {
      "form": "fuddle-duddling",
      "tags": [
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    },
    {
      "form": "fuddle-duddled",
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  "senses": [
    {
      "glosses": [
        "To depart, to be off."
      ],
      "id": "en-fuddle-duddle-en-verb-4QvMmraS",
      "links": [
        [
          "depart",
          "depart"
        ],
        [
          "be",
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          "off",
          "off"
        ]
      ]
    }
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        "To depart, to be off."
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-03-12 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-03-01 using wiktextract (68773ab and 5f6ddbb). 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.