Old-timey Slang of the Day

heavy-cake: a ladies' man

Old-timey Slang of the Day

sitzbein: da butt (it's from da Germans)

Old-timey Slang of the Day

A lovely phrase for today:

scratch gravel: to leave quickly. This one is a mid-19th century phrase. I like it a lot. It conjures up images of flying chunks of rock and cartoony fast-moving feet.

Old-timey Slang of the Day

Here's one that surprised me when I looked it up in my slang dictionary.

zilch: gibberish; double talk; meaningless language

Huh? It doesn't even list the more common meaning ("zero" or "nothing") in my dictionary (Wentworth and Flexner, eds. Dictionary of American Slang), which was published in 1960. Weird.

Old-timey Slang of the Day

Here's an odd one.

marfak: butter.

Apparently, this was used in the army for a while, and it comes from an old brand name for a chassis lubricant made by Texaco. Clever!

Old-timey Slang of the Day

Today's word:

darb: an excellent person or thing. As in, "Ain't that a darb?!" or "She's a darb, Sully, a darb!" or "My new jalopy is a real darb, I tells ya."

This comes up a lot in movies from the 1920s and 1930s. I've also seen it in an old Krazy Kat cartoon from the 1910s. Most recently, I heard it in Sons of the Desert, a great Laurel & Hardy comedy I saw on TCM the other day. I think I heard three different permutations of it in that one.

Old-timey Slang of the Day

I think I will start collecting old-timey slang and posting it on this blog. Here's one.


flub the dub: to loaf, to "screw up" (used in the 1940s)