Diddling

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Spending time on petty or pointless actions ; to cheat or defraud someone, often by small-scale deception
2. Involving oneself in useless or idle tasks ; engaging in dishonest acts to gain advantage or money unfairly
3. Performing trivial or inconsequential tasks ; deceitfully taking money or goods by trickery or manipulation

Etymology: Few English verbs have a more tangled ancestry than "diddle," and the trail runs through a stage-play swindler. In Kenney's farce "Raising the Wind" (1803), a character named Jeremy Diddler makes a living by borrowing small sums he never intends to repay. His name may have been chosen as a playful nod to an older dialect verb "duddle," meaning "to trick," and the character's reputation may in turn have reinforced the verb's sense of cheating people out of money or goods. That older dialect verb is itself a knot of possibilities. "Duddle" appears in the 16th century with the sense "to trick," while a 17th-century "duddle" meant "to totter." Scholars suspect these may have been blended with a word for shaking or trembling, which in Middle English was "dideren." That line reaches back to Old English "bedyderian," meaning "to trick, deceive," and the same root produced Dutch "bedotten," meaning "to fool," showing how widely the idea of duping was shared across the North Sea languages. The sense of busying oneself with trifles seems to grow naturally from the idea of fiddling or fussing away at small things, though this is less well documented than the swindling sense. Among the verb's later and far less polite uses, the 19th century added "to have sex with" and "to molest," and the 1950s added "to masturbate."

Synonyms: fiddling, dawdling, wasting time, fooling around, messing about

Antonyms: working, laboring, striving, toiling, achieving