Very pertinently it was demanded of Plato, why a picked chicken, which was clearly a ‘biped without feathers,’ was not, according to his definition, a man? But I am not to be bothered by any similar query. Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.”
Edgar Allan Poe, “Raising the Wind; or, Diddling Considered as One of the Exact
Sciences” (1843)
N. B. The reader is entreated not to search for “diddling” using Google’s image search engine.
Wirkman Comment 