Doodling - How the word came into the twentieth century

Preliterate, primordial, the doodle is at once the most common and the most ignored art form. 
Hilobrow (2009)

The Oxford English Dictionary which defines the doodle as “an aimless scrawl made by a person while his mind is otherwise applied” 
Hilobrow (2009)

While our current sense of doodle is relatively new, it is an old word. In his Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson defines a doodle as “a trifler, an idler,” calling it a mere “cant word” and suggesting that it derives from the expression “do little.” Later dictionaries, however, trace it from the Portuguese doudo, for foolish, or more plausibly from the Low German dudel, as in dudeltopf, a nightcap (an etymology that crosses aptly with that of “dunce cap,” so named for the medieval Scholastic philosopher Duns Scotus, whose aversion to classicism earned the derision of Renaissance schoolmasters). The best-known such use occurs in the colonial sobriquet “Yankee Doodle,” which may have originated as a Dutch New Yorker nickname for Anglo-American colonists — with Yankee from the Dutch New Yorker Janke, or “Johnny,” which in turn became a catchall British nickname for Americans during the Revolutionary War. By the late nineteenth century, it is used to describe a cheat; and gradually “doodling” becomes the name of idle, deviant, or erratic behavior. 

Before the twentieth century, the nearest term was scribble — a word with an obviously Latin origin that came into use, seemingly coeval with widespread vernacular literacy, in the late Middle Ages. But scribbling is not doodling, because scribbles are marks made in haste or by an uncertain hand. Doodling, by contrast, is beyond craft and criticism; it belongs to us all; it’s impossible to do it badly — or well. It springs from that flourishing thicket, common to everyone, where mind shoots forth its florid branches from the rootstock of the animal brain. Its intent, if it has one, differs from the preliminary brainstorming of sketching and the territorial mark-making of graffiti: it is the graphic expression of ennui, an existential criticism of the world-as-such. 
Hilobrow (2009)

 But for the practical monks, even doodling had a reason: their term for the practice was probatio pennae, the “proving of the pen.”
Hilobrow (2009)

Hilobrow (2009) In Praise of doodling [online] Available from: http://hilobrow.com/2009/08/24/in-praise-of-doodling/ [date accessed 10th September]