Fiddlesticks

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Marguerite from Atlanta, Georgia.

Hi, Marguerite. Welcome to the show.

Hey there. What’s on your mind?

What’s on my mind is an old word that people really don’t use anymore, but I’m very curious about being from the South.

You know, I grew up and I read Gone with the Wind, and now my 13-year-old daughter just recently read it, and we both noticed that Scarlet, the heroine, would often use the word fiddlesticks when she was frustrated with something or something didn’t turn out her way, which happens quite a bit in the book.

She also uses fiddle-dee-dee, but in the movie, fiddlesticks doesn’t appear, but fiddle-dee-dee does.

So my question really is about fiddlesticks, and is it truly in the book? Am I remembering correctly? And if so, where does it come from?

So what’s happening when fiddlesticks or fiddle-dee-dee come up? What’s the circumstance?

Oh, you know, Scarlet doesn’t get her way about something, or she’s being forced to do something she doesn’t want to do, like eat a piece of pie right before she’s trying to put on her corset to go to a dance.

I hate when that happens.

My kind of gal.

That’s not what I say.

So she’s like, well, fiddle-dee-dee, I’ll have pie if I want to. Something like that.

Exactly.

When she asserts her will, she sometimes uses those phrases.

I remember the line from the movie because Janet Leigh is just so adorable. And when she says it, there’s a little swish of the head and roll of the eyes or something.

Am I remembering that correctly?

You are.

She’s very animated, and she’s charming and self-absorbed all at the same time.

Right, right.

So this is a really interesting question, Martha, right?

Yeah.

This is good history.

Yes, it’s old, old, old.

Old, old, old.

Fiddlesticks.

Hundreds of years.

400? Roughly?

At least to Shakespeare’s time, right?

Oh, really?

Yeah, Shakespeare’s time.

So there’s this notion here that a fiddle, for some reason, is a bit of a trifle, that it’s something almost irrelevant. And also, it’s kind of a fun word to say. And so you’ll find fiddlesticks and fiddle-dee-dee more or less appear at about the same time, maybe 50 years apart. And in terms of language, that’s considered adjacency, you know, right next to each other.

And they just come to be used just to mean nonsense or rubbish or anything empty or pointless or a way of dismissing, as Scarlet did, a way of dismissing a circumstance or something that somebody said or a point of view.

So a fiddle is trifling and the fiddle stick, the bow that you play it with is even more trifling.

Right, something like that.

And we don’t know why it’s considered trifling, but it appears incredibly early.

And actually one of the earliest uses is just the word fiddle.

Wow, that’s fascinating.

So it dates back all the way back to Shakespeare.

You can find fiddlesticks in Shakespeare.

Yeah, there’s a line in Henry IV, the Devil Rides on a Fiddlestick.

Interesting.

That is fascinating.

I never knew Scarlet and Shakespeare were connected.

So now I have that connection, which is great.

Yeah, yeah.

English is a…

Two peas in a pod.

I think I’ve said this before, maybe too often, but English is a really slow-moving river.

And we tend to focus our attention on the dragonflies on the surface because they’re brightly colored and they flit about.

I mean, if we can call new words dragonflies.

But the river as a whole is just this ponderous, slow-moving thing.

And it’s not surprising to have a 400-year-old term.

It really isn’t.

Grandparent, you have A Way with Words.

I know, I should do a radio show.

I really appreciate y’all unraveling this mystery.

I can’t wait to tell my daughter where it comes from, and maybe this will make her read her Shakespeare this year in English.

Excellent.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, Shakespeare is just loaded with cool little phrases.

It might take you a bit of time with the modern ear and eye to suss them out, but once you get to the bottom of them and start to understand them, they take a hold on you, and you find them just coming out in your own speech.

Marguerite, thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Y’all have a nice day.

You too.

Take care now.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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