Fuddy-Duddy............................

Fuddy-duddy

Meaning

A stuffy or foolishly old-fashioned person.

Origin

If any term sounds old and English, it must be this one. As so often,
intuition is found to be inadequate as fuddy-duddy appears to be of
American origin, possibly via Scotland, nor is it especially old. The
first record that I can find of it is from the Texas newspaper The
Galveston Daily News, 1889:

"Look here; I'm Smith - Hamilton Smith. I'm a minister and I try to do
about right ... I object to being represented as an old fuddy-duddy."

That usage - without any accompanying explanation - seems to suggest
that the readership would have been expected to have been familiar
with it. That is quite possible, there are several citations in
American newspapers from the end of the 19th century that relate to a
pair of fictional wags called Fuddy and Duddy. A string of their
rather weak gags was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript. Here's
an example from a November 1895 edition:

Fuddy: So Miss Dandervecken is going to marry an Englishman. A lord, I suppose?
Duddy: Well, no, not exactly: but I understand that he's often as
drunk as a lord.

Whether or not the expression 'fuddy-duddy' was already known and the
names were taken from it, or whether it was the other way round, we
can't now tell. The coincidence in the dates of the arrival of the two
characters and the phrase does suggest that there was a connection of
some kind.

Duddy was a Scottish term meaning ragged - duds having been used to
refer to rough tattered clothes since the 15th century. Fud, or fuddy,
was a Scots dialect term for buttocks. In 1833, the Scots poet James
Ballantyne wrote The Wee Raggit Laddie:

Wee stuffy, stumpy, dumpie laddie,
Thou urchin elfin, bare an' duddy,
Thy plumpit kite an' cheek sae ruddy
Are fairly baggit,
Although the breekums on thy fuddy
Are e'en right raggit.

The full-on Scots dialect in that sentimental, Burns influenced rhyme
is difficult to translate precisely. The gist of the meaning is:

Poor scruffy little lad, bare and ragged, your wet belly and red
cheeks are swollen and the trousers on your buttocks are torn.

There is a British term - 'duddy fuddiel', which is also recorded from
around the same date. William Dickinson's A glossary of words and
phrases pertaining to the dialect of Cumberland, 1899, has:

"Duddy fuddiel, a ragged fellow."

There may be a link between 'duddy fuddiel' and 'fuddy-duddy' but, as
they don't mean exactly the same thing, we can't be certain.

One thing we can be sure about; that the cartoon character Elmer Fudd
inherited the name from the phrase. 'Fuddy-duddy' was in general
circulation in the US well before the character was created in around
1940 and the expression accords with his old-fashioned and obsessive
temperament.

In a rather sad sequel to the Boston Transcript's role in the coining
of 'fuddy-duddy', Time magazine reported in 1939 that a survey
commissioned by the paper found that, "the most frequent word used by
advertisers to describe the paper was fuddy-duddy". The Transcript
ceased trading soon afterwards.