Fuddle duddle

The fuddle duddle incident in Canadian political history occurred on February 16, 1971, when Prime Minister of Canada Pierre Trudeau was alleged to have spoken or at least mouthed unparliamentary language in the House of Commons, causing a minor scandal. Trudeau mentioned the words "fuddle duddle" in an ambiguous answer to questions about what he may or may not have said in Parliament.

In February 1971, opposition MPs accused Trudeau of having mouthed the words "fuck off" at them in the House of Commons. When pressed by television reporters on the matter, Trudeau would only freely admit having moved his lips, answering the question, "What were you thinking, when you moved your lips?" by rhetorically asking in return "What is the nature of your thoughts, gentlemen, when you say 'fuddle duddle' or something like that?" Thus, it remained unclear what Trudeau actually mouthed.

In a 2015 speech his son Justin Trudeau stated that his father "didn't actually just say 'fuddle duddle'".

There is a popular misconception that "fuddle duddle" was coined as a euphemism by the Hansard reporter who prepared the official transcript of Trudeau's words for that parliamentary session. However, Hansard did not record the exchange. In any case, Trudeau used it during a media scrum in the immediate aftermath of the parliamentary incident itself, leaving little time for a Hansard transcript to be consulted or even prepared.

Trudeau may have coined the phrase on the spot. It did not gain wide currency in the long term, and did not enter most dictionaries of Canadian English, other than the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

There is an example of the phrase's use in the early 1940s, in "Mother Finds a Body", by Gypsy Rose Lee: "...when [he] asks me where I was on the night of so-and-so, I'll tell him to go fuddle his duddle".

An unofficial transcript of the CBC clip is as follows:

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