{"id":7648,"date":"2012-09-27T16:42:31","date_gmt":"2012-09-27T15:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=7648"},"modified":"2012-09-27T16:42:31","modified_gmt":"2012-09-27T15:42:31","slug":"noodling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=7648","title":{"rendered":"Noodling"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently I came across the word <strong>noodling<\/strong> which in the context referred to singing an improvised sort melody made up of nonsense syllables over the top of a song. I hadn&#8217;t encountered this usage before so remembered it. I thought this sort of thing would be called improvisation or scat singing. Have you heard of noodling use in this way.<\/p>\n<p>According to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oed.com\/view\/Entry\/128172?rskey=cQF1cc&#038;result=1#eid\">OED<\/a>, a noodle can be a stupid or silly person; a slang term for the head; long string-like pasta-type stuff; or a trill or improvisation on an instrument (mainly in jazz).<\/p>\n<p>According to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Noodling\">Wikipedia<\/a> noodling &#8220;is fishing for catfish using only bare hands, practiced primarily in the southern United States.&#8221; Other names for this activity  include catfisting, grabbling, graveling, hogging, dogging, gurgling, tickling and stumping. I&#8217;ve heard of tickling for trout, but never of noodling for catfish, or those other terms.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/idioms.thefreedictionary.com\/noodling\">Free Dictionary<\/a> lists a number of noodle related phrases: <\/p>\n<p>&#8211; to noodle around = to wander around; to fiddle around with something<br \/>\n&#8211; to noodle over something = to think about something.<br \/>\n&#8211; to use one&#8217;s noodle = to use one&#8217;s head\/brain<\/p>\n<p>Have you heard or do you use any of these expressions? If not, what equivalents might you use?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently I came across the word noodling which in the context referred to singing an improvised sort melody made up of nonsense syllables over the top of a song. I hadn&#8217;t encountered this usage before so remembered it. I thought this sort of thing would be called improvisation or scat singing. Have you heard of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}