Word: twiddle Part of Speech: noun Etymology: Unknown. Perhaps a blend of twirl, twist, or twitch; fiddle. Pronunciation: /ˈtwɪdəl/ 1. A slight twist with the fingers. Example: He put away the receiver with a twiddle of pudgy fingers. Example: The hero, who must have been only a very few years older than Tom himself, gave a cursory nod and a twiddle of his fingers, then turned to his left to address Daniel Lysons who did not answer but caught Tom’s eye and raised his own eyebrow at this rudeness. 2. A wiggling movement. Example: Why should I agree that a twiddle of skirts from right to left and pointing a toe in one direction mean “He loves me,” while the reverse twiddle and the toe pointed in the opposite direction “He loves me not”? Example: Instead, flagellar motion causes the bacterium to swim smoothly (called a run), then stop and tumble (a twiddle), followed by another period of smooth swimming 3. A small decorative embellishment. Example: A great many fidgety occupations will come to an end: we shan’t put a pattern on a cloth or a twiddle on a jug-handle to sell it, but to make it prettier and to amuse ourselves and others. Example: Literally construed the Act would allow design right to be claimed in the design of an insignificant part—a mere ‘twiddle’, as it was put in argument. 4. A small musical flourish. Example: “Oh, auntie,” she exclaims, “these great Goths of Englishmen put a twiddle into the last bar of the ‘Minstrel Boy,’ just fancy that!” Example: That opening little flutter down the scale evokes an atmosphere when played by the flute; on the pianoforte it is a mere twiddle. 5. A tilde. Example: For those places which feed input arcs leading to more than one transition, a “twiddle” symbol (e.g., ‘~’) may be used as the enabling predicate for one of the transitions. Example: The twiddle symbol indicates that a node has a particular distribution. For example, x ~ dbin(p,n) means that “x is distributed like the number of successes in n observations of a Bernoulli process.” Inadvertent use of an “=” sign instead of a twiddle or an arrow is one of the most common reasons for a compilation error message. 6. A drawn line that is curvy or twisted. Example: It will then be seen that the inscriptions are very nearly alike, but an expert in Arabic or Vedic writing would recognize at once that they differ in more respects than in having a “twiddle too much or a twiddle too little.” Example: But D’s flourish was not generally a simple curl but a twiddle, as seen in the words of (35, 37, 70, 79, 94), sealf (85, 146) and yf (95, 142); this twiddle, which also appears in the Mistress Poem (p. 256), was however not an exclusive feature of f₁ but a striking personal habit, […] 7. A tiny bit. Example: Trying to tune in on your own face color is a bit like that: a twiddle too red, a twiddle too pale, and the whole image goes haywire. Example: But I don’t care a twiddle if I offend Danny DePuzo or not. 8. A tizzy. Example: Hey, diddle, diddle, we’re all in a twiddle, / Although we’re cuffed and we’re cuffed, / To be quite exact we cannot act, / For, you see, we are all of us stuffed. Example: Your mother’s going to have a twiddle fit if you dumped a perfectly good lord in the river.