She fumfered around and refused to give a straight answer.

In school, Dr. Noah heard lectures on [Sigmund] Freud, [Carl] Jung and [Alfred] Adler. There wasn't much chance to try out their ideas in Monticello. Pragmatic medicine was practiced up there. To fumfer with the locals, any dreams, say what's in the mind, what do you see in the blots, would produce too many complications.

"Well," she continued, searching for the right words, "you're young, you're attractive, you're . . . no threat, if you know what I mean." Ron looked Liz straight in the eye. "I-don't-know-what-you-mean." / "Well, you know . . ." Liz fumfered. "You and Talbot."

It was not what I had expected. I began to fumfer. "Perhaps I'm just here to buy a cookbook on Afghan cuisine."

The interviewer began the dialogue by asking if my father would feel equal outrage had the blacklist targeted Nazis rather than Communists. Wrong-footed, Frank [Tarloff] fumfered some sort of response.

President [Donald] Trump's tax-reform rollout came stumbling out of the gate this week. And much of the blame belongs to the clumsy, hacky salesmanship of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Chairman Gary Cohn, who fumfered his way through an awkward White House press briefing.

Thanks to some storytelling gymnastics that would score straight 10s at the Olympics, Anastasia ends up as the head of the fiction division at an important publishing company. At her first staff meeting all the grey hairs are fumfering about declining numbers.

He tears through his chapter books, bursting into the room, bushy hair on end, to ask for definitions: Perplexed! Secretary! Brassiere! We give him most, and fumfer around others, especially when he gets into the newspaper.

Fumfering – a word we get from Yiddish – means to mumble, mutter, murmur, dither, waffle, be evasive, temporize and stall. Fumfering is also the right term to describe Israel’s immoral and imprudent policy on the Ukraine crisis and war.

I fumfered with the USB stick, trying and failing to plug it in.

There was a candle on the nightstand, she remembered. After a great deal of fumbling and fumfering around in the dark, she managed to get it lighted.

For an excruciating half hour, Jeremiah starts the engine, fumfers with things in the cab, gets out to polish the hood ornament, shakes hands, waves good-byes.

Take, for instance, the media executive who told me he got hooked on Lost via iTunes, tried to watch it on television one Wednesday night, realized he didn't know what network it was on, started fumfering around with TV listings, and then decided it was just easier stick to downloads.

Or perhaps it's having to watch tens of thousands of passengers fumfer around in their bags, unload their electronics, plastic bags, shoes and water bottles.

I'm still fumfering with the infotainment system in my Sorento.

Fumfer

Meaning

Verb

Synonyms