Definition of "twaddle"

"What ineffable twaddle!" I cried, slapping the magazine down on the table; "I never read such rubbish in my life."

1886, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “The Science of Deduction”, in A Study in Scarlet (Beeton's Christmas Annual; 28th season), London; New York, N.Y.: Ward Lock & Co., November 1887; republished as A Study in Scarlet. A Detective Story, new edition, London: Ward, Lock, Bowden, and Co., 1892, page 28

I would rather be rude than to listen to twaddle from a man I’ve known.

1907, E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey, Part II, XX

It was her other self who had written that letter. It not only bored, it rather disgusted her real self. "Flippant and silly," said her real self. Yet she knew that she'd send it and she'd always write that kind of twaddle to Nan Pym.

1918 June, Katherine Mansfield [pseudonym; Kathleen Mansfield Murry], “Prelude”, in Bliss and Other Stories, London: Constable & Company, published 1920, chapter 12, page 66

To Edward […] he was terrible, nerve-inflaming, poisonously asphyxiating. He sat rocking himself in the late Mr. Churchill's swing chair, smoking and twaddling.

1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter 12, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill Company, page 181