fuddy-duddy

Asked if he regrets that fuddy-duddy framing, Armstrong says, “It was meant to get a reaction, and it did. But it wasn’t my favorite moment. I’d rather have just put the music out and let it do the talking.”

Richard Martin says: "It was the 60s, the government wanted to be modern and thrusting, it wanted to get rid of old fuddy-duddy stuff."

Charles’ first wife, Diana, chafed at him for dressing and acting much older than his years and tried to get him to lighten up — at least shed the fuddy-duddy lace-up shoes and put on a pair of loafers, for heaven’s sake.

Few Britons now recoil at the prospect of King Charles III, even if he sometimes seems more a fuddy-duddy uncle than a national patriarch.

In an age of micro news cycles that come and go like puffs of wind — and running against an incumbent president who tweeted at all hours, about whatever seemed to cross his mind — Biden’s fuddy-duddy approach to the modern news media offered an implicit promise to voters: I’ll be the remedy to the way that Donald Trump lives rent-free in your heads.