"Fuddy-duddy" (or "fuddy duddy" or "fuddy-dud")[1] is a term for a person who is fussy while old-fashioned, traditionalist, conformist or conservative, sometimes almost to the point of eccentricity or geekiness.
[2] "Fuddy-duddy" is considered a word based on duplication and may have originated as a fused phrase made to form a rhyming jingle.
"[5] Gary Martin states: "William Dickinson's A glossary of words and phrases pertaining to the dialect of Cumberland, 1899, has: "Duddy fuddiel, a ragged fellow""and "in 1833, the Scots poet James Ballantyne wrote The Wee Raggit Laddie: Wee stuffy, stumpy, dumpie laddie, Thou urchin elfin, bare an' duddy, Thy plumpit kite an' cheek sae ruddy, Are fairly baggit, Although the breekums on thy fuddy, Are e'en right raggit.
[8] Ambrose Bierce's story Who Drives Oxen Should Himself be Sane, published in 1918, starts out with a use of the word and discussion of it as a "unique adjuration".
[9] The term is also used in the title of juvenile fiction including Kay Hoflander's The Chautauqua Kids and the Fuddy Duddy Daddy: A Tale of Pancakes & Baseball,[10] and the Uncle Fuddy-Duddy series by Roy Windham and Polly Rushton.