John: Hi I’m John Green. Welcome to my salon. This is Mental Floss on YouTube. Here at mental_floss
we've got a growing collection of slang dictionaries. So, today, I’m going to share with you some
old school slang with you, like how “a wet sock” means a limp handshake. The goal here,
of course, is to bring some of these awesome slang terms back into style.
So let’s get started.
[Intro]
“Happy cabbage” is a sizable amount of money to be spent on self-satisfying things.
You know, like cabbage. This was the old days.
“Pang-wangle” is to live or go along cheerfully in spite of minor misfortunes. Like Mickey
Mouse, who goes on cheerfully despite having a dog who's a friend and also a dog who's
a dog. And also, come to think of it, Thor, who goes on despite having Loki as a brother.
And Yoda, who goes on despite Luke Skywalker's incessant whining!
“In the ketchup” means “in the red” or “operating at a deficit.”
“Flub the dub” means “to evade one's duty.” No, DUTY.
“A pine overcoat” is a coffin.
“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.”
“Zib” is a nincompoop.
To “give someone the wind” is to "jilt a suitor," which, nowadays, we call the Rose
Ceremony at The Bachelor.
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?! Oh, another quarter for the staff pork chop party fund!
“Cop a mouse” meant “to get a black eye.” Not to be confused with the terrifying
cock-a-mouse from How I Met Your Mother.
“Don't sell me a dog” was a fancy way of saying “don't lie to me.”
“A door-knocker” was a type of beard “shaved leaving hair under the chin, and upon each
side of mouth forming with mustache something like a door-knocker." Damn hipsters.
A bald head was called a “fly rink.”
“A gigglemug” was a “habitually smiling face.” Whereas a giggleMUGSHOT is a picture
of Robert Downey Jr. after he got arrested.
“A nose bagger” was “someone who takes a day trip to the beach. He brings his own
provisions and doesn’t contribute at all to the resort he’s visiting.”
If something or someone was “not up to dick,” it was not healthy.
“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 Dundee.
“Whooperups” were “inferior, noisy singers.” I’m looking at you, William Hung. And also,
you, me.
“A rain napper” was an umbrella.
And your mouth was your sauce box. Context is everything.
All right, 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 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.
So what happens when a pretzel-bender drinks too much? Well, we get to use some of these
old slang terms for being drunk, like having your flag out, or being soapy-eyed, or full
as a tick, or seeing snakes or canned up or zozzled. We enjoy the occasional zozzling.
That's why we keep tequila on the wall of magic. Or you could be owled, or striped,
or squiffed, or swacked!
Moving on to old phrases to describe excessive heat, and they needed a lot of them in the
days before air conditioning. "Hotter than Dutch love in harvest." You also
frequently heard "the bear got him." (The bear, in this case, was heatstroke.) "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. And finally, lest you think that our ancestors never worked
blue, we have "hot as a half-f**ked fox in a forest fire." Do we have a half-f**ked fox
on the wall up here? No? No? There's Linus. Fat lot of good he does us.
Then we have the opposite: ways to describe the freezing cold.
"It gives a body the flesh-creep," or as we know it, the shivers.
It could be "colder than the hinges of hell," or "colder than a brass toilet seat in the
Yukon." And lastly, "so cold that the milk cows gave
icicles," which I’m pretty sure is scientifically impossible.
The 19th-century Australians had some phrases we may want to adopt.
Like, to "have one's shirt out" means to be angry. Similarly, someone who's acting crazy
is "off his kadoova" or "off his chump."
To "hump the swag" means not what you think it means, but to carry your luggage on your
back.
“Happy returns” describes vomiting, despite those returns being, at least in my experience,
less than happy.
And someone who's tipsy could be called “a leanaway.”
There’s also some specific Beatnik slang.
Like, "off the cob" means corny. And food-related, “red onion” is another name for a dive
bar.
To "focus your audio" means to listen carefully.
"Claws sharp" means being well-informed on a variety of topics. You know, like someone,
for instance, who’s able to host a list show about a wide variety of topics from children’s
television to hoaxes to slang words...
But if you know too much, particularly if that information could lead you to ratting
someone out, you might have "bright disease." Often fatal. At least in the mafia.
Moving on from Beatnik slang, there are actually a lot of old-school ways to call someone a
rat. Like "blobber," "cabbage hat," "pigeon," "viper," "telegram."
There are also, of course, many interesting words for the male and female anatomy.
Like, for guys, we have: "Master John Goodfellow," "gentleman usher," "the staff of life," "the
Cyprian scepter," "the maypole," among many others.
And for females we have "the Phoenix nest," "the Netherlands," "Mount Pleasant," "Mrs.
Fubbs’ parlor." I'm sure there are others, but now that you have "Mrs. Fubbs' parlor,
do you really need others?
Anyway, bring these things together and, at least according to the 1811 version of the
“Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” you get: "amorous congress," "basket-making,"
"blanket hornpipe," or "convivial society."
And if you were caught cheating on your significant other a century ago, you could be accused
of "carrying tackle," "being on a left-handed honeymoon," or in Shakespeare's time, "groping
for trout in a peculiar river."
Enough about sex. Let's talk about stuff that really matters: food!
"Cluck and grunt" means "ham and eggs." "Chicks on a raft" is "eggs on toast." “Bloodhound
in the hay" means "hotdog with sauerkraut," and "frog sticks" means "french fries."
"Hounds on an island" is "franks and beans." Any kind of meat served rare is "on the hoof."
A "pair of drawers" meant two cups of coffee. And “Adam's ale,” “city juice,” and
“dog soup” all are less-short ways of saying "water."
And lastly we return to my salon so that I can tell you that a "George Eddy" is a customer
who doesn't tip well, and this former restaurant server would just like to tell you DON'T BE
A GEORGE EDDY.
Thanks for watching Mental Floss here on YouTube, which is made with the help of all of these
nice people. Every week we endeavor to answer one of your mind-blowing questions. This week’s
question comes from Emilee Kotnik who asks, “Why do you hear your own voice differently
than everyone else?”
This is actually a question Mental Floss has answered before so you can find that in the
description, but basically, sounds are captured by our outer ear and then strike the ear drum,
which vibrates and sends the vibrations to the inner ear, which translates them into
signals that the auditory nerve can like understand and then send to the brain.
But when we speak, the inner ear is picking up ear drum vibrations in addition to vibrations
from inside your body. So like it’s a combination of all those vibrations that makes the sound
of your own voice. It makes it very, like, mellifluous, generally. But then when other
people hear it, it sounds less full than you know it to secretly be.
Anyway, if you have a question that you’d like answered, please leave it below in comments.
We'll try to answer as many as we can. Thank you again for watching, and as we say in my
hometown, don’t forget to be awesome.