Aina and I are taking tapdance lessons. We have been for a while, in fact, but I’m still pretty bad at it. (Aina, who has two degrees in dance, is of course doing somewhat better.) But I’ve learned some of the foundational movements and steps. And one in particular we were working on a lot this week was the…
…well, the instructor was calling it a perididdle, but he was a substitute (a good one, mind you); our regular instructor calls it a paradiddle. But our previous instructor, I thought, called it a taradiddle.
I’m probably wrong about that, though. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of tap and its history and personages. Most likely, I was just mishearing her. A tapdance studio is not the quietest of places.
If you want to look it up, you might not immediately get the results you want. To start with, if you try perididdle, any dictionary will just stare blankly back at you. Google will suggest that you must have meant paradiddle. So anyway, it’s not peri, as in periwinkle or peritoneal. It’s para.
But then if you look up paradiddle in a dictionary or encyclopedia, it will just tell you that it is a basic drum pattern, an even beat played left-right-left-left or right-left-right-right. It seems that diddle is a term for a double stroke, whereas a paradiddle is two alternating single strokes followed by a double stroke. So, you know, it’s a diddle with something about it – para being ‘about’; Wiktionary suggests it may be related to Greek παραδίδωμι paradídomi ‘give over, hand over, deliver’.
But don’t put too much into that Greek derivation. The fact is that a diddle sounds like “diddle” and a paradiddle sounds like “paradiddle.” So this classical appearance is more likely a bit of pareidolia.
Especially since diddle is not from dídomi. The word diddle as we have it, mind you, does not normally refer to the drum pattern, except in that specific context; it otherwise means ‘cheat, swindle’ or ‘dodder’ or, more recently, ‘molest’ and a few other things. This traces back to Germanic roots, though the connections are kind of fiddly – there are a few different roots that might be muddled and dithering.
One way or another, though, diddle appears to be the base of taradiddle (also spelled tarradiddle), which means ‘fib, falsehood, trivial bit of twaddle’. We’re not entirely sure where the tara comes from; it is perhaps a trifling lexical imposture.
Anyway, to get back to taps: Although a dictionary won’t tell you about the tap step, various web pages and videos will. A paradiddle is a four-beat sequence with one foot: dig-spank-step-drop. This means you dig your heel against the floor, pull it back and tap the toe as you pull the foot back, then step the toe down, and then step the heel down as well. And then you do the same on the other foot, usually, and back and forth. It doesn’t sound quite like “taradiddle”; to my ear it’s something more like “poodle paddle.”
Well, at least when you do it right. And when I’m doing it slowly, I get the steps right. But once we speed it up, my reflexes addle and my feet dissimulate, and I quickly pass from paradiddle to a terpsichorean taradiddle.
