Fiddlesticks

Word of the Day for Thursday 26^th December 2013

Fiddlesticks \FID-l-stiks\, interjection:

(used to express impatience, dismissal, etc.)

"...If he had been an English lad, he would have been off to his sweetheart long before this, without saying with your leave or by your leave; but being a Frenchman, he is all for Aeneas and filial piety,—filial fiddle-sticks!"
-- Elizabeth Gaskell, My Lady Ludlow, 1858

The lovers were fiddlesticks, he thought, collecting it all in his mind again. That's fiddlesticks, that's first-rate, he thought, putting one thing beside another. But he must read it again. He could not remember the whole shape of the thing.
-- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 1927

Fiddlesticks came to English in the 1400's from the late Middle English term fidillstyk.

Thanks to:www.dictionary.com