What it means
Twaddle is silly, empty nonsense, the sort of waffly drivel that sounds like words but says nothing at all. It has a quaint, slightly old-fashioned ring, the kind of thing a no-nonsense aunt would snap at the telly. Whether it is a pompous speech or a daft theory, calling it twaddle dismisses it as not worth a second of your time.
Usage examples
"Do not believe that twaddle about the moon landing being fake, it is utter rubbish."
"The pamphlet through the letterbox this morning was the usual twaddle about the new mayor’s ambitious plans to pedestrianise the high street, three pages of glossy paper and zero concrete dates for the actual work to begin somewhere in twenty thirty."
"He filled three pages with absolute twaddle and still did not answer the question."
"My uncle has been spouting twaddle about cryptocurrency for the whole of Christmas dinner, he heard a podcast in the taxi from Heathrow last Tuesday, and he is now convinced that the family savings should be moved into a token nobody else around the table can pronounce correctly."
Where it comes from
Twaddle entered English in the seventeenth century, formed from the dialect verb to twiddle, meaning to talk idly or to handle something pointlessly. The eighteen-hundreds saw the word become standard dismissive vocabulary for empty discourse, used freely by Dickens in his journalistic essays for the Household Words magazine. The flexibility of twaddle as both noun and verb made it useful to Victorian editors who needed a polite alternative to stronger insults, and the word has lingered in British speech as the genteel cousin of nonsense, rubbish and bollocks. Its faintly old-fashioned ring is now part of its charm.
Other ways to say it
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