(v. t.) To move up and down on one's knee or in one's arms, in affectionate play, as an infant.
(v. t.) To treat with fondness, as if a child; to fondle; to toy with; to pet.
(v. t.) To play with; to put off or delay by trifles; to wheedle.
Example Sentences:
(1) Soames spent many days at Chartwell, the Churchill family home, as a young boy, and remembers being dandled on the great man’s knee.
(2) His second wife's parents ran the home at La Preference, and the Guardian has found photographs of him in a Santa suit, dandling children on his knee at Haut de la Garenne.
(3) Born in the Sierra Leone bush, the son of a chief, he came to Stockholm to study engineering – it was he who introduced her mother to the music of Miles Davis, upon whose lap she was dandled as a child.
(4) At lunchtime, I talk to him as he dandles his twin babies on his knees, and is matter-of-fact, rather than techno-triumphalist, about what he's trying to do.
Wheedle
Definition:
(v. t.) To entice by soft words; to cajole; to flatter; to coax.
(v. t.) To grain, or get away, by flattery.
(v. i.) To flatter; to coax; to cajole.
Example Sentences:
(1) Still, there's an upside to 007's monogamy, and it may just explain how this much-maligned film has wheedled its way so irrevocably into my affections: uniquely in the world of Bond, it allows a vein of romantic adventure to develop that's real, not illusory.
(2) Pleading, shouting, wheedling, cajoling: none made any difference whatsoever.
(3) At the risk of being a complete bore …” he wheedles to John Reid, then the health secretary.
(4) Bird, convinced he wanted to be a writer and performer, had been quietly wheedling his school to teach drama at A-level.
(5) Netanyahu should be wooed and wheedled, coaxed and cajoled.
(6) He is terribly afraid of seeming self-satisfied, and is trying to wheedle out of the photographer a promise that he won't make him look pleased with himself.
(7) Labour and Tory alike may wheedle, protest and whinge.
(8) In a cable dated August 2004 titled "Alleged North Korean involvement in missile assembly and underground facility construction in Burma", one of the embassy staff wheedled information from an officer during a visit to Rangoon .
(9) It has heard wheedling from France's prime minister: "We will do everything to get [the triple A] back."
(10) The fact that he privately bombarded ministers with wheedling letters, contrary to his constitutional position, was an open secret but the government fought to keep the details under wraps.
(11) He's nuts – he should be wheedling with me; all a photographer can work with is a gallery of expressions, and after 37 years of no success at all, I don't think he has the facial musculature for smug.
(12) He wheedled a few things out of me - that was part of the fun.
(13) Kadyrov's response was characteristically wheedling.
(14) In one respect, America’s aeronautical myth has to wheedle its way around a flagrant contradiction: Air Force One carries the commander-in-chief, but he is not in command of the plane.
(15) Parker, meanwhile, had wheedled $50,000 from investors, and the pair moved to California.
(16) On stage, it had added significantly to his air of menace and deceit; he was treating the beaming Mrs W with wheedling charm while another side of his face was twitching with twisted insincerity.
(17) We felt that Lego forfeited its responsibility to children by allowing Shell to wheedle its way into playtime and normalise its brand for the next generation.
(18) That intervention was almost certainly the result of wheedling by the FA, who seem so much more comfortable with this sort of provenly ineffectual princery than with being held democratically to account.
(19) Now, they get their celebrity fix from gossip mags, such as Heat and Reveal, which pull celebrities apart like a gaggle of playground bullies, wheedling out their secrets and laughing at their fashion fails, while for aspirational lifestyle, fashion, and serious features, they will buy Elle, Grazia or Instyle – magazines that appear to respect their emotional maturity and purchasing power.
(20) In an attempt to wheedle a confession from the lonely Stagg, she said he would win her heart only if he would admit to sharing her love of Satanism and child murder.