fiddle away

We've fiddled away the better part of an hour before Jean has the nerve to say what's on her mind.

Turner came into the room, and watched as Constable fiddled away.

I was fiddling away with a file, listening.

Let's be thankful that this is one dance treatment of the score without an obsessed violinist fiddling away.

A bunch of oldsters, fiddling away their time.

'Oh, dear, have we fiddled away another afternoon?

We are all making significant and successful efforts to control the problem and are not fiddling away the hours while Rome burns.

The orchestra was fiddling away at the lively ditty that would accompany the acrobats.

"Well enough," he said, still fiddling away.

No, this one-this one -is not going to fiddle away her time foolishly jumping and tumbling around.

Then the captain would clamp on a pair of headphones and sit at the helm fiddling away at the dials.

Humpty Dumpty sits on the roof fiddling away Nero-like as the metaphorical weight of capitalism brings down the house.

Meanwhile she was fiddling away at the comfit dish, opening it and shutting it in her desire to see how it was made.

"When I look at pictures from the 19th century, I see Paganini fiddling away wildly or Liszt playing with what looks like 30 fingers.

"He has real power with the bat and is exactly the sort of bowler we need to fiddle away the middle overs - he's Symonds-lite, but that's good enough for me."

When we reached the M.R.I. control room, Clint Kilts, the scientific director of the BrightHouse Institute, was fiddling away at a computer keyboard.

All the Barnies were on the stage, and the fiddler fiddled away as they struck up a rousing song with a chorus that all the villagers joined in most heartily.

"Mick would be fiddling away like this, Charlie would be going like this, then Jim would come in and sing something completely different to what the other two were doing.

The energy, the capacity to fiddle away a lifetime without dignified work, and, in its place, the performance of the trivial, even the voluntarily trivial, as we have constructed here in The Game.

"You've been fiddling away a lot of your time with that play that the Ursuline Academy girls are putting on," Mary Virginia was saying to him, "and then yesterday you were no good at all.

About halfway through his first set at the West End Gate on Thursday night, Claude (Fiddler) Williams fiddled away at a solo cadenza as an introduction to the tune "Laura."

Now it happened one day, while they were sailing on the high seas, that Trusty John, sitting on the forepart of the ship, fiddling away to himself, observed three ravens in the air flying toward him.

So a few years ago, when I began writing a novella called "The Christmas Tree," about the Rockefeller Center tree, I happily fiddled away with my characters, and what I didn't like, I changed.

Mr. Pendergrass and Mr. Baroody testified for more than three hours today, drawing conclusions different from those of Mr. Kennedy, who said the hearings would "show that while workers died, the agency has fiddled away their lives."

He has it fixed in his poor dim noddle that art is fiddling away (he can't understand why I don't 'rub out') until you get an exact photographic likeness and that making lovely cool designs (Ben Nicholson) is vaguely immoral.