A great green dragon
flies over trees
Exhales its fiery breath
scorching all the leaves
* taradiddle (noun) – pretentious nonsense
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 be poppycock. 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. (from Merriam-Webster)
Top image courtesy of Pixabay
Lower photo (cropped) by Cristina Gottardi courtesy of Unsplash
Wind Rush 
Awesome post, LuAnne!
Sunday, as I was raking leaves, The Boy and his friend from down the street were out chasing dragons. Friend ran up to me all out of breath and asked if I’d seen any dragons around. I told him no, the only dragons I’d been battling all day were the nefarious invisible leaf-breathing autumn dragons and that they were wearing me down. Ha ha ha!
Balderdash was one of my favorite board games in the late 80s/early 90s, and amongst my friends, I was the undisputed champion. When it’s your turn, you present a list of 5 words, one of which has to be a word you made up. The other players have to guess which word is fake. I need to see if that game is buried in a closet at Mom & Dad’s house, my kids would probably love it!
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Great story, Dennis. Glad you shared.
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I love this Luanne! You turn up some wonderful forms! And use them so well!
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Lovely leap of imagination! Thanks,too, for introducing me to a new word whose sound mirrors its meaning.
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It is a fun word, isn’t it? Some people collect comics, some collect coins, I like to collect new words. 🙂
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