noodle

   This word appeared in the mideighteenth century and was much used to describe a foolish person. One of the earliest authors to use it was Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Mrs Shandy has just given birth to a son but he is not expected to live. Mr Shandy tells the servant girl to run to the curate and have the child christened ‘Trismegistus’. She remembers only that it begins with ‘Tris’, whereupon the curate, who happens to be called Tristram, assumes that his own name is to be used. ‘There is no gistus to it, noodle!’ he tells the servant girl. This tortured explanation is offered in the book to explain how the hero came to bear the name which his father hated most in the world.

   The vocative occurs again in another wellknown passage in Hard Times, by Charles Dickens. Mr Bounderby’s house-keeper, Mrs Sparsit, addresses her employer touchingly as ‘my benefactor’ to his face, “yet it is an indubitable fact…that five minutes after he had left the house…[she] shook her right-hand mitten at his portrait, made a contemptuous grimace at that work of art, and said, “Serve you right, you noodle.”’ When she is eventually dismissed, Mrs Sparsit pauses to tell her benefactor: If that portrait could speak, sir - but it has the advantage over the original of not possessing the power of committing itself and disgusting others - it would testify, that a long period has elapsed since I first habitually addressed it as the picture of a noodle. Nothing that a noodle does can awaken surprise or indignation; the proceedings of a noodle can only inspire contempt. ‘Noodle’ in this sense is of obscure origin. It came into existence some time before the word that describes the pasta.