[f. as prec. + -ING1.] The action of the vb. FIDDLE in various senses.
1. Playing the fiddle.
c. 1460. Emare, 389.
| Trommpus, tabours and sawtre, | |
| Bothe harpe and fydylleyng. |
a. 1680. Butler, Rem. (1759), I. 7.
| For, as th’ Arcadians were reputed | |
| Of all the Grecians the most stupid, | |
| Whom nothing in the World could bring | |
| To civil Life, but fiddling. |
1702. Addison, Dialogues upon … Medals, iii. Wks. 1721, I. 530. We see Nero’s fidling and Commodus’s skill in fencing, on several of their Medals.
1879. Besant & Rice, ’Twas in Trafalgar’s Bay, ii. (1891), 22. There could be no fiddling that evening.
2. Fussy trifling; petty adjustment or alteration.
1622. Massinger, Virg. Mart., IV. i. Ant. Hell on your fiddling!
1709. W. King, Ovid’s Art of Love, XII. 68.
| Sometimes your Hair you upwards furl, | |
| Sometimes lay down in Favourite Curl. | |
| All must through twenty Fidlings pass, | |
| Which none can teach you but your Glass. |
1762. Songs Costume (Percy Soc.), 240.
| ’Tis so metamorphos’d by your fiddling and fangling, | |
| That I scarce know my own, when I meet it again. |
1878. Richard Taylor, Stonewall Jackson and the Valley Campaign, in N. Amer. Rev., CXXVI. March–April, 249. That may stir them up. I am sick of this fiddling about.
