A recent article described a sort of protest or public demonstration in which two members of PETA -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals -- made out on a bed in the middle of a sidewalk to prove that vegetarians make better lovers. The activity of the scantily-clad couple was described by Reuters as "canoodling." Anybody want to take a stab at the derivation of this one?

canoodle U.S. slang Origin obscure.
Mencken mentions it as an American invention.

(a word that looks to be related is firkytoodling.)

edit: but here's some speculation from NI3:
perhaps from English dialect canoodle, n., donkey, fool, silly lovemaker, perhaps alteration of noodle (blockhead)

As a youngster, I recall some adults using the word "noodle" to mean "head" or "brain" as in "You have to use your noodle to solve this problem." Can't say I know from where/what that derives, either.

There's always "noodling around" on the piano.

"Tracings was composed in March, 2000 for a recital given by Erin Cooper-Gay. In our collaboration we discussed exploring the jazz-ballad idiom, whose primary influence comes in the laid-back nature of this brief work, though other gestural and harmonic debts are owed to that genre as well. I had the notion of letting the hornist warm-up on stage, blowing some long tones and feeling the instrument out in a loose sense of time over a discrete, but throbbing pulse. In the course of noodling around the horn player begins "tracing" over the beginning of the well-known solo from Tchaikovsky¹s 5th symphony, which smoothly spins off into an original tune, becoming the piece¹s refrain."

~ Peter Gilbert

The first time I encountered this word was in the book Unnatural Death, by Dorothy L. Sayers. That book was first published in 1920, in England.