taradiddle.....?????

Remember last week when I discussed those little white lies that we were all told ( and hereditarily passed on?) Well thanks to the wealth of information the Internet, and Yahoo, holds and shares, this morning I learned they have an actual name.....taradiddles.  I thought I was a pretty well read individual but taradiddle is a word I've never read or heard. Here's the skinny on my new "Word of the Day"...

Word of the Day

• taradiddle
• 
• \tair-uh-DID-ul\

• DEFINITION

noun

1

: a trivial or childish lie : fib

2

: pretentious nonsense

• EXAMPLES

"Even parents with the very best of intentions find themselves telling taradiddles to their offspring." — From a blog post by Ben Schott at nytimes.com, November 12, 2010 

"

• DID YOU KNOW?

The true origin of "taradiddle" is unknown, but that doesn't mean you won't encounter a lot of balderdash about its history. Some folks try to connect it to the verb "diddle" (meaning "to cheat"), but that hasn’t been proven and may turn out to bepoppycock. You may hear some tommyrot about it coming from the Old English verb "didrian," which meant "to deceive," but that couldn’t be true unless "didrian" was somehow suddenly revived after eight or nine centuries of disuse. No one even knows when "taradiddle" was first used. It must have been long before it showed up in a 1796 dictionary of colloquial speech (where it was defined as a synonym of "fib"), but if we claimed we knew who said it first, we’d be dishing out pure applesauce.
As I have asserted many times.... we're never too old to learn....and that's no tardiddle!


Read more at http://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/2013/01/14/#mP2FgszsHwOXpObD.99