Babbling about Moisture and Diddly-Squat

One phrase I came across a while ago that intrigued me was "diddly-squat." My grandparents use it, my parents use it, I use it, but I realized, who in the world would have made that up? What is diddly? Does it derive from "diddle?" And what does it have to do with squatting?  And so I looked it up.  According to Oxford English Dictionary, it means "very little; of little to no significance." It derived from "doodle 'excrement,'" as the dictionary terms it, which took me a minute to figure out can be translated to "doodly-shit."  I found that there may be some connection with "doodle" from the song "Yankee Doodle Dandy" dating back to the American Revolutionary War, where "doodle" means "a silly or foolish fellow; a noodle."

The second interesting word I encountered just this past weekend was "babble," after finding out from my parents that I apparently tend to babble a lot when I ingest alcohol.  Where did "babble" come from?  Apparently the syllable "ba-" is derived from baby-talk, which is fitting because the definition of "to babble" is "To talk excessively or inappropriately; to chatter quickly, excitedly, or at length; to speak indiscreetly," and the noun "babble" is defined as "foolish, incoherent, or excited talk; gabble; prattle; (also) meaningless prating; empty rhetoric."  

Lastly, I was watching How I Met Your Mother this week, and the episode that came on was the one where Barney accepts Lilly's "challenge" where she says she would sit through a performance by him no matter how bad it was because he was her friend.  Earlier in the episode, Lilly briefly mentions how much she hates the word "moist," which Barney takes to his advantage and proceeds to present the first part of his performance, which is repeating the word "moist" over and over again for 40 minutes.  I'm not sure why, but I've actually heard a lot of people say they hate that word, so I couldn't pass it up to write in this assignment.  The definition of moist is "Slightly wet, imbued with moisture; containing liquid in a state of suspension or absorption; not dry; damp, humid."  If you look on youtube, there's about a thousand rants from people complaining about how much they hate the word moist; there was even a VH1 segment about it.  Does anybody else find this word to be gross?!