Thing To Do Today, Possibly: fiddle.

You can be on the fiddle, which involves minor stealing by dodging your way through administrative systems; you can play fiddle, which will involve a violin and a folk tune:


Fiddlin' Bill Henseley. Photo by Bill Shahn

 and you can fiddle about, which means being busy doing nothing very much, especially if it involves struggling with something small.

Some connections to playing folk music are easy to see - such as having a face as long as a fiddle:


Minnesinger, 1200s, Mannesse Manuscript

and it's easy to see the link between violin playing and working with something small or fundamentally not life-threatening.

As for the committing-fraud sort of fiddling, there are theories linking the word to the Emperor Nero (who is said to have fiddled while Rome burned) and also with the sort of fiddle which is the rim of a sailor's plate. Sadly, though, sailor's plates have never had rims called fiddles (though their work surfaces have had) and Nero neither had a fiddle nor stooped to indulging in petty crime (he was a man for an grand evil gesture).

What we do know about financial fiddling is that it started in America in the second half of the 1800s, and that from the beginning it had the dual meanings of swindling and attending closely to small non-essentials.

A man trying to steal small amounts of money is likely to be doing a lot of attending closely to apparently small non-essentials, and this, I suggest, is how fiddling the accounts probably began as an expression.

Thing To Do Today Possibly: fiddle. This word comes from the Old English fithele, probably from the Latin vītulārī, to celebrate: