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A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is..... On the fiddle
Engaged in a fraud.
‘Fiddling’ is usually meant to mean ‘cheating in a petty
way’, perhaps falsifying one’s expenses or not declaring
all of one’s taxable income. Of course, a fiddle is also a
slang term for violin.
There are a couple of proposed derivations of the
‘cheating’ meaning of the phrase ‘on the fiddle’, each of
them having supporters who are firm in their belief. Let’s
take the oldest first. The expression is said by some to
derive from the Emperor Nero, who famously ‘fiddled
while Rome burned’ and was a byword for corruption
and dishonesty. The second suggestion is that the ‘fiddle’
was the name of the raised edge of the square wooden
plates used by sailors. If a sailor took a normal amount
of food he was said to have a ‘square meal’ and if his
plate was overflowing he was said to be ‘on the fiddle’.
As is often the case, those suggestions have only been
mentioned in order to knock them down. The Nero story
is mere fancy. It may be a nice play on words that he was
‘on the fiddle’ in both senses, that is, he was both corrupt
and a violinist (actually he wasn’t even a violinist, there
being no such instrument in Nero’s lifetime, but let’s not
get sidetracked) but that’s all this tale has going for it.
The culinary procedures on board sailing ships don’t
offer much of an explanation either. The idea that
sailors’ plates had raised edges and that these were
called fiddles is quite incorrect. There were fiddles in
sailing ships’ galleys but those were arrangements of
small posts and strings arranged around the edges of
tables that were used to stop plates falling on the floor
in rough weather.
If the above isn’t enough to convince then the fact that
‘on the fiddle’ in the ‘acting fraudulently’ meaning is a
mid-20th century idiom should clinch it. The expression
wasn’t known in the age of sail and certainly not in
ancient Rome. A good place to look for a phrase like
‘on the fiddle’, with its association with minor crime,
would be court records, and if the expression were
in common use in English it might be expected to be
found in the database of cases provided by the Central
Criminal Court in England and Wales, commonly known
as the Old Bailey. This is a comprehensive record of all
the criminal cases brought to the court between 1674
and 1913, and no one was accused in The Bailey of being
‘on the fiddle’ during all that time.
The term ‘fiddle’ appears to have originated in America.
It is recorded in an 1874 edition of John Hotten’s Slang
Dictionary:
Fiddle... In America, a swindle or an imposture.
Hotten also included this entry:
Fiddler... A sharper, a cheat; also one who dawdles over
little matters, and neglects great ones.
’On the fiddle’ was taken up by the British forces in
WWII. It was well enough established in popular slang
in the UK by 1961 for it to have been used as the title of
a Sean Connery film and that is the first example of it
that is found in print. The plot involved a young Connery
playing a streetwise rough diamond who runs various
street scams while serving in the British army.
Is there an English phrase or saying that you would
like to know more about?
Email it to us on [email protected]
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