The "fribler" (and bonus: "Not in dignified use")

[Ann Burlingham]

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 10:14 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: The "fribler" (and bonus: "Not in dignified use")
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>
> I saw the "fribble"s cited by Mark, but thought that
>
>>So, a man who frivols with women's hearts, who wastes their love negligently.
>
> was at the least a more specific sense for
> "fribble" than the "2. intr. *In early use*, to
> act aimlessly or feebly, to busy oneself to no
> purpose; to ‘fiddle’", and perhaps different
> enough to be new.  (1710 for "fribler"seems to be
> early enough use not to be the same as the early
> sense of "fribble".  And "frivol" as Mark uses it
> above is dated by the OED only from 1866.)

Fribbles are very familiar to me as a reader of Georgette Heyer's
novels. According to her biography by Jane Aiken Hodge, Heyer
collected, among other things, journals from the period (s) she wrote
about, and took her research quite seriously. (Another writer's use of
one of the words she'd collected in her studies made her consider a
plagiarism charge, if I recall the bio correctly - well, I'm sure
there was more, but she'd found the word in some original source she
owned. I'm still dying to know who the offending author was.)

She seems to have owned a trove of material - does anyone know if her
papers are collected at a library somewhere?

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