1. Of persons and personal attributes: Occupied with fads, particular about trifles, crotchety. Of things: Of the nature of a fad, taken up as a fad.
1824. Mrs. Sherwood, Waste Not, I. 11. She is so faddy.
1885. The Saturday Review, LIX. 21 Feb., 238/1. Sometimes the local sanitary official may be crotchety and ‘faddy,’ and may refuse his certificate to a house perfectly fit to live in; or, again, he may be lax, or may be disposed to prophesy smooth things to his employers.
1885. Kendal Mercury, 30 Jan., 6/4. Such a faddy thing as the planting of trees at this place.
1888. McCarthy & Praed, Ladies’ Gallery, II. vii. 112. When I ask him for an opinion on anything, which isn’t very often, perhaps, I always say I want his opinion as a faddy old book-collector and not as a City banker.
2. sb. = FAD sb.2
1887. G. R. Sims, Mary Jane’s Mem., 239. It’s bad enough to be under a real missus who is a faddy.
Hence Faddiness.
1865. Cornh. Mag., May, 621. The extreme faddiness of the old falconers.
