Diddling by Edgar Allan Poe — Read

-- or the abstract idea conveyed by the verb to diddle -- is sufficiently well understood. Yet the fact, the deed, the thing, diddling, is somewhat difficult to define. We may get, however, at a tolerably distinct conception of the matter in hand, by defining -- not the thing, diddling, in itself -- but man, as an animal that diddles. Had Plato but hit upon this, he would have been spared the affront of the picked chicken.

Very pertinently it was demanded of Plato, why a picked chicken, which was clearly "a biped without feathers," was not, according to his own definition, a man? But I am not to be bothered by any similar query. Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man. It will take an entire hen-coop of picked chickens to get over that.