Some of his acquaintances expressed surprise at his sudden demise.

“He was as fit as a fiddle”, one said.

Yes, he was as fit as a fiddle. He was also dead.

Why do we associate fiddles with health? Why can’t a person be as fit as a piano, or a new car, or a badly tuned trumpet?

This is a question that has baffled people for hundreds of years.

Did you know that the expression “fit as a fiddle” is 400 years old and written comments about the fiddle are 400 years older than that?

Back in 1603 Thomas Dekker in The Batchelars Banquet (spelling wasn’t a big thing in 1603) said a nurse was “as fine as a farthing fiddle”.

A few years later, in 1616, William Haughton used the words “as fit as a fiddle”, but others have been known to say something was “as fine as a fiddle”.

Was it the alliteration that suited the play on words, similar to “right as rain” or did the expression come into use because fiddles needed constant attention to remain in top condition?

The evidence seems to indicate that fiddles needed constant attention. Admiration was also expressed for the people who played the instruments. 

But the word fit did not necessarily mean in good health. Four hundred years ago it was associated with danger, even excitement and skill. 

In passing, and I don’t know why I include this: Ambrose Bierce wrote in the Devil’s Dictionary in 1881 that a fiddle was an instrument “to tickle human ears by friction of a horse’s tail on the entrails of a cat”.

My big dictionary takes up several pages to cover all the expressions that are associated with fiddle.

They range from fiddle to fiddlesticks, even a fiddler who is a swindler or a cheat.

But be careful about calling a fiddler as a cheat just because he sometimes makes beautiful music.

To fiddle-faddle means to be busy with trifles, fiddlesticks can mean something absurd, and of course to fiddle the books can get you into lots of trouble.

But if you are as fit as a fiddle you aren’t necessarily in good health. You could be playing second fiddle and heading for third fiddle.

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A city newspaper recently had the word backflip on a front-page heading and then used the word again a few pages inside.

This prompted a person of my acquaintance to say something like “that is the word I hate most in newspapers”.

Actually, she used far stronger language than that, but I need to consider the sensitivities of this newspaper’s editor.

She added: “Why can’t they simply say that this person changed his mind?”

You won’t find the word backflip in many dictionaries, because possibly the word is something made up in the sub-editors’ room near the end of a hard day.

Some of the dictionaries I consulted had drawings of a person doing a backward somersault, to illustrate what backflip meant.

I like the description in one dictionary: “A mixture of beer and spirit sweetened with sugar and heated with a hot iron”.

But why do newspapers say a backflip when they mean a change in one’s thinking?

The answer is fairly simple.

If newspapers said simply that a person changed his mind, that would make the newspapers very boring, and we can’t have that.

Usually, it is only politicians who perform backflips.

That sounds dramatic and something that politicians are expected to do.

They are the types of people who should perform backflips.

lbword@midcoast.com.au