What's the difference between fiddling and piddling?

Fiddling


Definition:

  • (p. pr. & vb. n.) of 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.

Piddling


Definition:

  • (p. pr. & vb. n.) of Piddle
  • (a.) Trifling; trivial; frivolous; paltry; -- applied to persons and things.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But I'd be piddling myself laughing and couldn't get myself together, meaning there were many retakes.
  • (2) A pugnacious Nick Clegg really got the Remain side going when he accused outers of behaving as if Britain was just “a piddling little island”, always being bullied by Brussels.
  • (3) Why would she give up her cosy life as a columnist and novelist working from home in Notting Hill to be editor of a title she described in the documentary as "a piddling magazine no one cares about or buys"?
  • (4) Hunt is locked into a no-win confrontation about a piddling amount of cash that – if the ballot that goes out tomorrow supports strike action, as it looks as if it will – could cost hundreds of lives.
  • (5) We do the best we can all day, every day to produce great product on piddling budgets and they call that success.
  • (6) That the Thames triumphed over competition from the mighty Amazon and idyllic rural waterways such as the Piddle in Dorset, can be explained by the prize's focus on restored and well-managed rivers.
  • (7) Aside from that, we see only two solutions: grab our culture by the lapels and convince everyone it’s fine to sit down for five piddling little minutes to have a coffee, or convince people to go down the reusable route.
  • (8) But the culture budget is pretty piddling anyway and transport argues that it is supposed to deliver a lot of the infrastructure spending that the coalition is now committed to increasing.
  • (9) Later she says of the title: "In the real world this is a piddling little magazine that nobody cares about.
  • (10) "The Piddle and the Amazon don't have those environmental pressures – the sewage, the industry."

Words possibly related to "fiddling"