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Tomfoolery is silly, playful behaviour — messing about, joking around, doing daft things when you should be getting on with something. It is a gentle word. When a teacher says 'that's enough tomfoolery', they are telling children to settle down, but they are not really angry; the word itself half-admits the fun. That is why you hear it most from older speakers, from teachers, and in a slightly performed, old-fashioned voice. Younger people would more likely say 'messing around' or 'goofing around'. The tone matters more than the meaning here: tomfoolery is never cruel and never serious . If someone breaks a window on purpose, that is not tomfoolery. If they were chasing each other round the room and a window happened to break, that was tomfoolery — and the word is doing quiet work, making it sound . The old noun 'a tomfool' (a stupid person) still exists but you rarely meet it now.
胡鬧、打鬧、瞎搞（語氣輕，帶點好笑，不是真的在罵人）
組成Tom（泛指『一般人、某某人』，來自人名 Thomas）+ foolery（傻事、胡鬧）. English used 'Tom' the way Chinese uses 某某 — for any ordinary man. A 'Tom fool' was that ordinary man being an idiot.
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
tomfoolerynoun/ˌtɒmˈfuːlə.ɹi/
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Foolish behaviour or speech.
- "Do not think THAT," I put in. "It was not so at all. I grant you that my behaviour was bad—I fully confess that it was so, and make no secret of the fact. I would even go so far as to grant you that my behaviour might well be called stupid and indecent tomfoolery; but, MORE than that it was not.
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slangJewellery.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。