Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Foolish talk; nonsense.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The stuff on which fools are feigned to be nourished; food for fools.
  • noun Transparent pretense or nonsense, as gross flattery, nonsensical talk, or foolish boasting.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun uncountable nonsense
  • noun countable Speakers and writers of nonsense.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Origin unknown.]

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Examples

  • But when an imported greenhorn dares to call his flapdoodle mixture 'Californian,' it is an insult to the State that has produced the gifted 'Yellow Hammer,' whose lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in the columns of the 'Jay Hawk.'

    The Bell-Ringer of Angel's Bret Harte 1869

  • But Being and Time cannot be dismissed as "flapdoodle" on the grounds of biography alone.

    Archive 2007-05-01 enowning 2007

  • But Being and Time cannot be dismissed as "flapdoodle" on the grounds of biography alone.

    enowning enowning 2007

  • So ended what has grandiloquently been termed "an Australian engagement," which, I may add, is just the kind of flapdoodle our troopers do not want.

    Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) Letters from the Front A. G. Hales

  • You're the last man I ever expected to hear that kind of flapdoodle from.

    The Three Partners Bret Harte 1869

  • After years of ruinous government profligacy on every citizen-demanded flapdoodle—from a Frisbee golf course in Austin, Texas, to West Virginia's Robert C. Byrd Institute for Advanced Flexible Manufacturing—Americans view both parties with disdain.

    The Unhappy Paradox of Santa-Statism Arthur C. Brooks 2011

  • At the time everyone thought the claim was "sheer mystical flapdoodle," as one American expert termed it.

    Nuclear Leak In North Korea 2010

  • At the time everyone thought the claim was "sheer mystical flapdoodle," as one American expert termed it.

    Nuclear Leak In North Korea 2010

  • In an effort to sanitize Paramount's portrait of a demimondaine, the studio publicity department churned out reams of flapdoodle, defining Holly as a "kook" rather than a B-girl.

    When Words Go Lightly to Screen 2010

  • Biden emphatically rejected what he rightly called the "unitary executive" theory of the presidency -- the flapdoodle cooked up by David Addington and John Yoo to legitimize torture and a host of other unseemly policies pursued by the Bush administration.

    Jacob Heilbrunn: Cheney's Out of Angles and Biden's Full of Them 2009

Comments

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  • Time someone thought about it instead of gassing about the what was it the pensive bosom of the silver effulgence. Flapdoodle to feed fools on.

    Joyce, Ulysses, 8

    January 3, 2007

  • nonsense, foolish talk

    November 8, 2008

  • "The stuff on which fools are feigned to be nourished"? Century, rocking it.

    April 2, 2011

  • "Who are not really sure if the sentence is Literature or whether it is just sheer flapdoodle. Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm.

    February 15, 2013

  • When the herren and frauen canoodle

    Over coffee and Viennese strudel

    They play silly games,

    Or coin tender names

    And other such lovers' flapdoodle.

    March 5, 2014