twiddle

twiddle (ˈtwɪd^əl)

—vb (when intr, often foll by with)
1.	to twirl or fiddle (with), often in an idle way
2.	to do nothing; be unoccupied
3.	(intr) to turn, twirl, or rotate
4.	rare (intr) to be occupied with trifles

—n
5.	an act or instance of twiddling

[C16: probably a blend of twirl + fiddle]

'twiddler

—n

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

twiddle

c.1540, "to trifle," of unknown origin; of the fingers, first recorded 1676. Fig. phrase twiddle one's thumbs "have nothing to do" is recorded from 1846; to twirl one's thumbs in the same sense is recorded from 1816.

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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Slang Dictionary

twiddle

n.
1. Tilde (ASCII 1111110, `~'). Also called `squiggle', `sqiggle' (sic -- pronounced /skig'l/), and `twaddle', but twiddle is the most common term.
2. A small and insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and generates several new ones (see also shotgun debugging).
3. vt. To change something in a small way. Bits, for example, are often twiddled. Twiddling a switch or knobs implies much less sense of purpose than toggling or tweaking it; see frobnicate. To speak of twiddling a bit connotes aimlessness, and at best doesn't specify what you're doing to the bit; `toggling a bit' has a more specific meaning (see bit twiddling, toggle).
4. Uncommon name for the twirling baton prompt.

Jargon
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FOLDOC

Computing Dictionary

twiddle definition

1. The tilde character.
2. (To make) a small or insignificant change. E.g. twiddling a program often fixes one bug and generates several new ones (see also shotgun debugging). Bits are often twiddled. Twiddling a switch or knob implies much less sense of purpose than toggling or tweaking it; see frobnicate. Bit twiddling connotes aimlessness, and at best doesn't specify what you're doing to the bit; to "toggle a bit" has a more specific meaning.
[Jargon File]
(1995-01-31)

Example sentences

There are also quite a few knobs that you can twiddle that will help convergence.

That's a lot of time to twiddle thumbs while the status bar ticks away.

If things do not go smoothly at startup, you have to twiddle some variables.

Yet until the random mutation appears, natural selection can only twiddle its thumbs.

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Matching Quote

"Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. Criticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon."

-D.H. Lawrence