Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Foolishness; nonsense.
- noun A trifle; a gewgaw.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Mere nonsense; an idle fancy or conceit; a silly trifle.
- noun plural Trivial ornaments; fallals.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun colloq. Nonsense; foolish talk.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun uncountable
Nonsense orfoolishness . - noun countable A
decorative object of littlevalue ; atrifle orgewgaw .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun nonsensical talk or writing
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Nobel lecture that follows, and since the standard biographical folderol is most easily found online at www. scripps.edu/chem/sharpless/, I hope to provide
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Almost lost in all the folderol is their brilliance.
Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert Timothy M. Gay 2010
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Almost lost in all the folderol is their brilliance.
Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert Timothy M. Gay 2010
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Almost lost in all the folderol is their brilliance.
Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert Timothy M. Gay 2010
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Almost lost in all the folderol is their brilliance.
Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert Timothy M. Gay 2010
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Lost in all the folderol was the fact that their opponent, Stephen F. Austin, actually won the game.
Deadspin 2009
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I want to hear what kind of folderol they think they've got, so I can clear it up once and for all.
Devil's Waltz Kellerman, Jonathan 1992
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OT, I know, but I can’t let this kind of folderol go unanswered....
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In the end the novels and stories of Henry James stand above all this folderol.
The Afterlife of the Lion Joseph Epstein 2012
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There's no evidence that Jesus was aware of all the folderol that the Bible says occurred at his birth, and there's no evidence that anyone made anything of it for a long time after his death.
Clay Farris Naff: The True Meaning Of Christmas In An International Age Of Science Clay Farris Naff 2011
whichbe commented on the word folderol
From before Shakespeare's "There was a lover and his lass, / With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonny no", right down to the present day, nonsense words have been a regular feature of song lyrics. You might think that it's a stretch to suggest another meaningless la-la lyric filler is the origin of this usefully dismissive word. However, that indeed seems to be its origin, although the usual form until relatively recently was falderal rather than folderol.
There are many traditional rhymes and songs with variants of "fal-de-ral" in them somewhere. For example, Robert Bell noted these words of an old Yorkshire mummer's play in his Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry Of England of 1857: "I hope you'll prove kind with your money and beer, / We shall come no more near you until the next year. /Fal de ral, lal de lal, etc." And Sir Walter Scott included a few lines of an old Scottish ballad in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819): "There was a haggis in Dunbar, / Fal de ral, etc. / Mony better and few waur, / Fal de ral, etc." Charles Dickens had gentle fun with this habit in his Sketches By Boz of 1836-7: "Smuggins, after a considerable quantity of coughing by way of symphony, and a most facetious sniff or two, which afford general delight, sings a comic song, with a fal-de-ral — tol-de-ral chorus at the end of every verse, much longer than the verse itself."
It was around 1820 that this traditional chorus is first recorded as a term for a gewgaw or flimsy thing that was showy but of no value, though it had to wait until the 1870s before it started to be widely used.
(from World Wide Words)
May 28, 2008
jinglebelljosie commented on the word folderol
also, falderal
November 8, 2008
ecbrenner commented on the word folderol
This is one of my favorite replacements for the f-word. Why I have no idea. It's not harsh, nor is its meaning related. Go figure.
July 23, 2009