Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
FOOTLING
The Brits have a useful adjective for trivial things, footling (pronounced FOOT-ling). And not merely trivial, but trivial in an annoying, driveling, blithering way.
It comes from the verb footle, "to talk or act foolishly, to trifle," and the OED's etymologists conjecture that footle derives from the French foutre, which I will leave for you to look up yourselves.
Considering how frequently we find our time wasted by people with their footling talk, it's a shame that the word has not crossed the Atlantic.
Example: From Somerset Maugham's Breadwinner (1930): "You do talk the most footling rot."