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• v  avoid (one's assigned duties)
• v  commit fraud and steal from one's employer
  We found out that she had been fiddling for years
• v  play the violin or fiddle
• v  play on a violin
• v  manipulate manually or in one's mind or imagination
• v  play around with or alter or falsify, usually secretively or dishonestly
• v  try to fix or mend
• s  (informal) small and of little importance
  a fiddling sum of money

• But she never employed a key tool the big 3-D molecular models that Watson and Crick were fiddling with at Cambridge.
• After 90 minutes of fiddling, an ordinary hacksaw was used to free the bolt.
• Instead of fiddling with the ratings, says PTI TV writer James Poniewozik, the Peacock Network needs to wise up before the Athens Olympics How NBC Stole the Olympic Spirit.

• fiddle
• shirk
• shrink from
• goldbrick
• toy
• diddle
• play
• tamper
• monkey
• tinker
• footling
• lilliputian
• little
• niggling
• piddling
• piffling
• petty
• picayune
• trivial

News & Articles

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• 'I just heard screaming:' Boy, 4, critically injured after TV falls on him
  A 4-year-old boy was in critical condition Friday, the morning after a 36-inch screen TV set fell on him as his father was fiddling with the cables.
  June 14, 2013 - KATU Portland
• The Feds’ ‘Ultimate Solution’ to Curb Distracted Driving
  NOVI, Michigan — Distracted driving kills more than 3,000 people each year in the United States, a figure that represents about 10 percent of all traffic fatalities. How many of those people die because they were fiddling with their phones ...        
  June 14, 2013 - Wired News
• Young People Don't Want to Read Your Boring, Age-Appropriate Books
  Millennials these days are so busy fiddling with their technological gadgets and maintaining their #personalbrands, they have basically forgotten how to read like grown-ups. The youth of today are eschewing realism and historical fiction in favor of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi novels. As part of NPR's month-long look at the media consumed by today's youth, they examine what these modern reading ...
  June 12, 2013 - Gawker

Quotes

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• David Tennant in guardian.co.uk
  The Doctor finds himself in a situation where he knows what the end is. It's all about whether he can un-knit the inevitable,Tennant said. "With this particular Time Lord's life coming to an end, if he starts fiddling with the fundamentals...
• David Blanchflower in guardian.co.uk
  Blanchflower, who was the sole dissenter calling for another interest rate cut this month while his colleagues voted to leave rates steady at 5.5%, said: "Worrying about inflation at this time seems like fiddling while Rome burns."
• Christine Milne in Melbourne Herald Sun
  Prime Minister Rudd was elected on the promise that he would be a policy boffin,Senator Milne said. "Instead of that, he's fallen at the first hurdle. He has jumped in with Brendan Nelson in a populist, fiddling at the edges, on fuel...