(n.) A stringed instrument of music played with a bow; a violin; a kit.
(n.) A kind of dock (Rumex pulcher) with fiddle-shaped leaves; -- called also fiddle dock.
(n.) A rack or frame of bars connected by strings, to keep table furniture in place on the cabin table in bad weather.
(v. i.) To play on a fiddle.
(v. i.) To keep the hands and fingers actively moving as a fiddler does; to move the hands and fingers restlessy or in busy idleness; to trifle.
(v. t.) To play (a tune) on a fiddle.
Example Sentences:
(1) And what did you have to do to get fired for Libor fiddling, rather than simply disciplined?
(2) Young people from ordinary working families that are struggling to get by.” Labour said Greening’s department had deliberately excluded the poorest families from her calculations to make access to grammar schools seem fairer and accused her of “fiddling the figures”.
(3) On Aswan, the lyre is represented by the Sudanese masenkop, Ugandan adungu, and Egyptian simsimiya and tamboura, while the spike fiddle manifests as the Ethiopian masenko and Ugandan endingidi.
(4) Benefit claimants will face lie detector tests and will lose benefits for a month if found guilty of fiddling the system under proposals unveiled by Gordon Brown on the eve of today's Queen's speech .
(5) Increasingly, imaginative ways were devised to fiddle the data or change practices in ways that achieved nothing except to create the appearance of improvement.
(6) Bercow also claimed MPs in the past fiddled their expenses as a "displacement activity" because Parliament had become irrelevant and ineffective.
(7) Other Hunt plans – banning gagging orders and the fiddling of mortality data, and blacklisting failed NHS managers like the former Mid Staffs chief executive Martin Yeates – will help plug obvious gaps in NHS practice, as judged against the strict new requirement for accountability.
(8) The line connecting the disgraced expenses-fiddling former MP Denis MacShane and the call to arms over immigration on the front page of today's Daily Mail is not immediately apparent, but it's there all the same.
(9) It is modern slavery enforced not through shackles and whips, but by fiddled contracts, missing permits and paperwork and the Guardian has found it happening just down the road from the desert palace of Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Khalifa al-Thani.
(10) They are also, in practice, in support of arguments that claimants are on the fiddle with a net 17% more believing "most people on the dole are fiddling one way or another".
(11) Wrestling with the worst crisis in the common currency's 11 years and accused of fiddling for three months while Greece went up in flames, Angela Merkel of Germany, Nicolas Sarkozy of France and other European leaders are to meet in Brussels on May 10 to unlock tens of billions of euros for Athens to put out the fire.
(12) • • • As I am leaving Rock Springs behind me, fiddling with the radio to find something other than pop music, Christian sermons, commercials or Christmas songs, I think back to what Alex said about his hope that Donald Trump would bring change.
(13) He fiddles around the margins of unequal opportunity – offering soft loans for first-time property-buyers, for example .
(14) "Fiddling with the job spec to suit one person, the sheer number of leaks that have gone on in this process, these things make good candidates pull out," said the source.
(15) The Chicks started out in 1989 playing hoedowns and street corners in their native Dallas, with Maguire on fiddle and Robison on banjo.
(16) The remarks by Tucker blew apart a campaign by Osborne to prove that Balls was one of a series of senior Labour figures who tried to "fiddle Libor".
(17) It was always easy to make fun of crime statistics, even before the UK Statistics Authority announced this week that it was formally dropping police recorded crime figures as a gold standard measurement, citing repeated allegations that some of the quarterly published figures have been subject to "a degree of fiddling".
(18) February 6, 2013 steve hawkes (@steve_hawkes) For two years after we poured billions in to save RBS, the bank was manipulating and fiddling.. You wonder what else was going on February 6, 2013 Ed Conway (@EdConwaySky) Usually fines paid to FSA go towards reducing its running costs.
(19) The vasectomy technique known as "Riddle's fiddle" is described as a foolproof method that prevents sperm from reentering the ejaculate.
(20) EO: I'm sure if we were sitting here talking about some low-income person who'd been found to be fiddling their books, we wouldn't be saying, "Oh, but they contribute to society in other ways" – that argument just wouldn't come up.
Tinker
Definition:
(n.) A mender of brass kettles, pans, and other metal ware.
(n.) One skilled in a variety of small mechanical work.
(n.) A small mortar on the end of a staff.
(n.) A young mackerel about two years old.
(n.) The chub mackerel.
(n.) The silversides.
(n.) A skate.
(n.) The razor-billed auk.
(v. t.) To mend or solder, as metal wares; hence, more generally, to mend.
(v. i.) To busy one's self in mending old kettles, pans, etc.; to play the tinker; to be occupied with small mechanical works.
Example Sentences:
(1) For further education, this would be my priority: a substantial increase in funding and an end to tinkering with the form of qualifications and bland repetition of the “parity of esteem” trope.
(2) "We should be working out how it should be ended, rather than tinkering around the edges."
(3) The transport secretary, Philip Hammond, indicated that the government had no appetite for the kind of structural tinkering that broke up British Rail and rushed the system into private ownership in the 1990s.
(4) Tinker with the tax treatment of the elderly and prepare to be accused of imposing a "granny tax" .
(5) He also says that continual tinkering with pension rules by successive governments could deter people from investing in pensions.
(6) As the global financial crisis deepens, the rich nations will be forced to recognise that their problems cannot be solved by tinkering with a system that is constitutionally destined to fail.
(7) The pre-briefing we’re seeing, tinkering with schedules, now going on about pay, it’s very, very threatening to an institution that’s loved, [even one] that needs to reform.” Jeremy Hunt was the last culture minister to try to increase NAO oversight at the BBC, in 2010.
(8) Jean-Claude Juncker , the European commission president, told the Guardian in December that Cameron could tinker with British law on social security and migrant rights, but that enshrining discrimination in EU law was a no-go area.
(9) The tinkering with the tort system following the 1975 malpractice crisis will not ease the constantly increasing cost burden on the health care delivery system.
(10) At the very least, it would seem to be tinkering with the formula of the biggest spiritual brand in the world, analogous to Coca-Cola changing its famous recipe in 1985 .
(11) ET 10 min: Am I the only person who found Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy interminably dull?
(12) Happily, there are suddenly more alternatives, indies, blended play and new tech enabled hybrids, toys that encourage tinkering, making and individuality.
(13) This suggests that Labour’s answer to Ukip cannot be purely tactical or about tinkering with policy.
(14) The existence of multiple neuronal representations of sensory information and multiple circuits for the control of behavioral responses should provide the necessary freedom for evolutionary tinkering and the invention of new designs.
(15) Even after the Daily Mail's Jack Tinker (obituary, October 29 1996) contrived for Shulman's career as a theatre critic to be brought to an end in 1991, he continued to write a column for the Evening Standard on art affairs - until he was 83.
(16) The Tasmanian Liberal premier, Will Hodgman, opposed “tinkering” with the system.
(17) His personal favourite is probably his own 1926 vintage Bentley, and he admits to being in seventh heaven tinkering "to a fault" with any old engine he can get his hands on.
(18) I think a lot of the things they publish tinker on racism and Islamophobia … but at the same time I think they have a right to do what they do.
(19) But if these opportunities are squandered because tinkering at the edges seems safer than radical reform, we will have failed every future rape victim.
(20) The sounds he discovered on his guitar, refined during hours of solitary tinkering in his home studio, adorned records by Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and thousands of other artists, both country and pop.