Footer
To fidget, fuss, mess about. To waste time at a task while looking busy. As a noun: a person who footers, or the action itself. A close relative of 'fooster' but with a more idle and aimless register: footering is what you do instead of getting on with things.
Etymology
From Scots 'fouter', from Old French 'foutre' (a strong vulgar verb whose modern English cognate is the f-word). The Scots and Ulster Scots use is much milder and entirely sanitised: to footer is to mess about, with no sexual or coarse connotation. The semantic drift from the Old French to modern Ulster Scots is dramatic - the same root produced one of standard English's most taboo words and one of Ulster's most innocent.
In a sentence
"He's footering with the radio - take the screwdriver off him before he breaks it altogether."
Historical notes
Footer and fooster are siblings rather than twins: fooster has more energy (the foosterer is at least trying to do something), while footer has less direction (the footerer is fiddling about waiting for something to occur). Footer is heard more in Ulster than in southern Hiberno-English; the wider Scots-speaking world also uses it. The Old French origin is a small lexical curiosity: a word once so coarse it could not be said in polite company is now the everyday Ulster word for messing about with a screwdriver.
Alternate spellings
futer · fouter
Sources
- Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), entry FOUTER v., n. · dictionary
- Macafee, Caroline. A Concise Ulster Dictionary. Oxford University Press, 1996. · dictionary