OLD FASHIONED SLANG
AND PHRASES
G'day folks,
Welcome
to some slang and old phrases, courtesy of John Green.
The goal
here of course is to bring some of these awesome slang terms back into style so
let's get started.
2. "Happy cabbage" is a
sizeable amount of money to be spent on self-satisfying things. You know, like
cabbage. This was the old days.
4. "In the ketchup" means in the red or operating at a deficit.
5. "Flub the dub" means to evade one's doody—No, duty.
6. "A pine overcoat" is a coffin.
7. "A butter and egg man," has nothing to do with breakfast preferences, it's actually, according to one dictionary, a wealthy but unsophisticated small-town businessman who acts like a playboy when he visits the big city.
8. "Zib" is a nincompoop.
9. To "give someone the wind" is to jilt a suitor, which now a days we call "The rose ceremony on The Bachelor."
10. The 1909 book Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English Slang and Phrase captured some great phrases that were falling out of favor even back then. For instance, they called sausages "bags O' mystery" which they are. Meredith, what kind of sausages? Pork sausages? Another quarter for the staff pork chop party fund.
11. "Cop a mouse" meant to get a black eye—not to be confused with the terrifying Cockamouse from How I Met Your Mother.
12. "Don't sell me a dog" was a fancy way of saying "Don't lie to me."
13. A "door-knocker" was a type of beard, quote, "shaved leaving hair under the chin, and upon each side of the mouth forming with moustache something like a door-knocker." Damn hipsters.
14. A bald head was called a "fly rink."
15. A "gigglemug" was a habitually smiling face. Whereas, of course, a giggle mugshot is a picture of Robert Downey Jr. after he got arrested.
16. A "nose bagger" was, quote, "someone who takes a day trip to the beach.
He brings his own provisions and doesn't contribute at all to the resort the he's visiting."
17. If something or someone was "not up to dick," it was not healthy.
18. "Take the egg" means to win. I guess this was back in the days before, like, trophies. Although, come to think of it, an egg might be better than a Dundie.
19. "Whooperups" were, quote, "inferior noisy singers." I'm looking at you William Hung and also, you, me.
20. A "rain napper" was an umbrella and
21. your mouth was your "sauce box." Context is everything.
22. Alright I gotta keep my sauce box moving. Here's a multi-purpose bit of slang, according to the 1967 Dictionary of American Slang: "Pretzel-bender" can mean a peculiar person, a player of the French horn, a wrestler, or a heavy drinker. You add all of those meanings of "pretzel-benders" together and you have Meredith's future husband. Am I right, Meredith?
Meredith: Oh yes.
John: Yeah, I'm right.
23. So what happens when a pretzel-bender drinks too much? Well, we get to use some of our old slang terms for being drunk. Like "having your flag out", or
24. being "soapy-eyed", or
25. "full as a tick", or
26. "seeing snakes", or
27. "canned up", or
28. "zozzled." We enjoy the occasional zozzling. That's why we keep tequila on the Wall of Magic.
29. Or you could be "owled" or
30. "striped" or
31. "squiffed" or
32. "swacked."
33. Moving on to old phrases used to describe excessive heat, and they need a needed a lot of them in the days before air conditioning, "hotter than Dutch love in harvest."
34. You also frequently heard "the bear got him"; the bear in this case was heatstroke.
35. "Full of moist," and don't get mad at me for saying the word moist, Internet; it's just a word, all words are created equal, moist is just, it's a beautiful word, moist, I'm gonna say it one more time, moist.
36. And finally, lest you think our ancestors never worked blue, we have "hot as a half-f***ed fox in a forest fire." Do we have a half-f***ed fox up on the wall here? No? No? There's Linus. Fat lot of good he does us.
I'm ...
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