• fuddy-duddy •
Printable Version Pronunciation: fê-dee-dê-dee • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Noun
Meaning: A bland, old-fashioned, usually middle-aged person who poses no threat and avoids excitement or risk; a stick-in-the-mud old fogey or, as a fuddy-duddy himself might put it: a milksop, a milquetoast.
Notes: Fuddy-duddy is a bit outdated and is more likely to be used by fuddy-duddies themselves than a hip scenester. Notice that you always replace the Y with an I before the plural -ES. Don't reverse engineer the plural and spell it in the singular fuddie-duddie; that might seem a bit harebrained.
In Play: Fuddy-duddies tend to be soft-spoken older males: "I love to go down to the park in the evening and stroll among the old fuddy-duddies playing checkers." (Everybody needs an occasional break from the excitement.) But this word can also apply to women: "My mom is such a fuddy-duddy she wants me to keep my collar bones covered!"
Word History: Today's Good Word is one of those nonsense words that flummox our British cousins (click here for Prince Charles's opinion). Ignore dictionaries that try to relate it to Scots English fuddy "animal tail, dock-tailed animal"; that explanation doesn't fly, float, or play. The word nearest today's Good Word is dud and the suffix -y is a marker of 'motherese', the language we speak to children. A duddy then would be a dud that appeals to babies. "So what about fuddy?" you ask. Americans love rhyme and rhythm, so English is packed with 'rhyme compounds' like itsy-bitsy, jeepers-creepers (a euphemism for 'Jesus Christ'), nitty-gritty, roly-poly, which could lead to hanky-panky or even boogie-woogie. Why do we do it? Well, nonsense is one of those things that you just can't explain. Okey-dokey?
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