{"id":9427,"date":"2013-12-14T11:16:03","date_gmt":"2013-12-14T11:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=9427"},"modified":"2013-12-14T11:16:03","modified_gmt":"2013-12-14T11:16:03","slug":"fudge-and-flapdoodle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=9427","title":{"rendered":"Fudge and flapdoodle!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Flapdoodle<\/p>\n

Another interesting word I came across this week is flapdoodle<\/strong> \/fl\u00e6p\u02c8du\u02d0d(\u0259)l\/, which the OED<\/a> defines as ‘the stuff they feed fools on’, which comes from the following quote:<\/p>\n

\u2018The gentleman has eaten no small quantity of flapdoodle in his lifetime.\u2019 \u2018What’s that, O’Brien?\u2019 replied I… \u2018Why, Peter,\u2019 rejoined he, \u2018it’s the stuff they feed fools on.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another example of use of this word is the exclamation ‘Fudge and flapdoodle!’, which I think sounds wonderfully silly, and is possible alternative to stronger exclamations.<\/p>\n

Flapdoodle is also ‘nonsense, bosh and humbug; a trifling thing or gewgaw’, and has been used as a verb meaning ‘to talk nonsense’.<\/p>\n

The etymology given in the OED is that it is ‘an arbitrary formation’, similar to fadoodle (something foolish or ridiculous; nonsense).<\/p>\n

There is also a tiny, folding sailing dinghy called the flapdoodle dinghy<\/a> (pictured top right).<\/p>\n

Do you know any similarly silly words with a similar meaning?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another interesting word I came across this week is flapdoodle \/fl\u00e6p\u02c8du\u02d0d(\u0259)l\/, which the OED defines as ‘the stuff they feed fools on’, which comes from the following quote: \u2018The gentleman has eaten no small quantity of flapdoodle in his lifetime.\u2019 \u2018What’s that, O’Brien?\u2019 replied I… \u2018Why, Peter,\u2019 rejoined he, \u2018it’s the stuff they feed fools […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9427","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=9427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}