FIDDLESTICKS

[Q] From Brian Archimbaud: I’m looking for the origin of fiddlesticks.

[A] A fiddlestick was at first just a violin bow. (Both fiddle and violin come from the Roman goddess of joy, Vitula, who gave her name to a stringed instrument; fiddle came down to us via the Germanic languages, violin through the Romance ones.) Fiddlestick is recorded from the fifteenth century, and Shakespeare used a proverb based on it in Henry IV: “the devil rides on a fiddle-stick”, meaning that a commotion has broken out; the imagery is obviously related to the broomstick of a witch, and perhaps there’s some thought of the noise a fiddle might make if the devil got to play it. At some point in Shakespeare’s lifetime, it seems fiddlestick began to be used for something insignificant or trivial, perhaps because fiddle-playing itself was regarded as something worthless or inconsequential. It took on a humorous slant as a word one could use to replace another in a contemptuous response to a remark. George Farquhar used it in this way in his play Sir Henry Wildair of 1701: “Golden pleasures! golden fiddlesticks!”. From here it was a short step to using the word as a disparaging comment to mean that something just said was nonsense.

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