all fiddledeedee
- idiom
- Archaic
:
tonterías
- He dismissed her concerns as all fiddledeedee and changed the subject immediately.
Examples
-
The story turned out to be all fiddledeedee, with no truth behind it.
-
That's just all fiddledeedee!
-
Don't believe everything you hear—most of it is all fiddledeedee anyway.
-
I can't believe you think that all fiddledeedee is important.
-
He dismissed her concerns as all fiddledeedee and changed the subject immediately.
-
The story turned out to be all fiddledeedee, with no truth behind it.
-
Don't believe everything you hear—most of it is all fiddledeedee anyway.
Synonyms
2
9.9
A small unimportant fuss that wastes time
2
9.9
Something of little or no worth
1
9.9
Silly, unimportant talk that wastes time
Foolish talk that people should not believe
Something that is not true or important
Antonyms
How Serious
Surface Forms
Morphology
all + fiddledeedee
The second constituent 'fiddledeedee' is a nonce/colloquial word with no transparent lexical meaning, so knowing 'all' does not allow a learner to infer 'nonsense' or 'trivial' from the parts. This phrase is idiomatic and unpredictable in meaning, making it opaque to a B1 learner who has not encountered it before.
Etymology
All fiddledeedee may come from a playful old saying that joins fiddle, a small violin, and the silly sound dee-dee to make a light, dismissive tune. People used that tune and those words to show something was 'nonsense' or 'not important', so today the phrase means the same thing.