Meanings
- uncountableAttitudes and behaviors characteristic of a fuddy-duddy; a tendency toward overly conservative persnicketiness.
Don't be fooled by the old wives' tale that creeping fuddy-duddyism has something to do with hardening of the arteries.
1967, Robert Cillier Page, How to Lick Executive Stress, page 222 more examples
As one who was born disliking most of whatever music was currently popular—preferring country-and-western and classical, and having a selective taste for traditional English, Scottish, Irish, and Russian ballads, some jazz and some blues—I did not instantly admit to fuddy-duddyism.
2001, Philip R. Craig, Vineyard Blues, →ISBN, page 71Yet it is also true that the position Tobin describes—the higher moral ground from which compositionists speak “against rigidity, legalism, authoritarianism, [and] fuddy-duddyism” and speak “up for students, freedom, innovation, creativity, and change" — would assert itself again and again in the arguments for experimental writing in composition classrooms, arguments put forth in a kind of second-wave expressivism by compositionists such as Winston Weathers, Wendy Bishop, Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, Derek Owens, and Geoffrey Sirc, among others.
2012, Patricia Suzanne Sullivan, Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies, →ISBN, page 19
Origin
Cite this entry
fuddy-duddyism. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/fuddy-duddyism
“fuddy-duddyism.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/fuddy-duddyism. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “fuddy-duddyism,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/fuddy-duddyism.
Source: fuddy-duddyism on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.