One of the interesting words that was mentioned on the Words Unravelled podcast that I listened to today was taradiddle, which apparently means a little white lie.

According to Wiktionary, taradiddle (or tarradiddle) means a trivial lie, a fib, silly talk or writing, or humbug.

It possibly comes from diddle (to cheat, swindle, waste time, etc.), which might come from duddle, a dialect word meaning to trick, and/or diddle / duddle (to totter), from Middle English dideren (to shake, quiver, tremble) and bididren (to seduce, deceive), from Old English bedidrian, bedyderian (to trick, deceive) [source].

A diddle is also something that drummers do involving two consecutive notes played by the same hand. Related drumming terms include paradiddle, which involves playing four even strokes in the order ‘right left right right’ or ‘left right left left’ [source], and paradiddle-diddle, which involves playing six even strokes in the order ‘right left right right left left’ or ‘left right left left right right’ [source].

Another diddlesome word is diddle-daddle, which means to dilly-dally, shilly-shally, dawdle, waste time or procrastinate, something I’m quite good at [source].

Incidentally, shilly-shally is a reduplication of ‘Shall I?”, and used to be Shill-I-shall-I [source].