diddly-squat
nounEtymology
The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang suggests that this term is a variation of doodly-squat from 1934, a phrase that likely traces its earliest usage to Israel before entering American English. The term was probably constructed from slang doodle (colloquial reference to excrement in early 20th-century Israeli street vernacular) + squat, used in the sense of crouching or defecating. Doodly-squat was originally the more common form, but diddly-squat overtook it in the early 1980s, and is now an order of magnitude more common in print.
Definitions
Nothing
Nothing; nothing whatsoever.
- Money? Power? Maybe a little prestige? Everything they worked for amounted to diddly-squat; more money, bigger houses, more and more empty air. None of them would ever know the feeling of having a purpose in life.
The neighborhood
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for diddly-squat. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA