83 Old Slang Phrases We Should Bring Back - mental_floss on YouTube (Ep.208)

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, 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. 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? Yep, 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 quote shaved leaving hair under the chin and upon each side of the mouth forming with mustache something like a door knocker Damn hipsters A bald head was called a fly rink a giggle mug was a habitually smiling face whereas

of course a giggle mugshot is a picture of Robert Downey Jr. after he got arrested

A nosebagger 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 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. Whoop-a-rups were, quote, 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

Alright, I gotta keep my sauce box moving. Here's a multi-purpose bit of slang. According to the 1967 Dictionary of American Slang, pretzelbender can mean a peculiar person, a

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? Oh yes. Yeah, I'm right. 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 being soapy-eyed, or full as a tick, or seeing snakes, or canned up, or zazzled

We enjoy the occasional zazzling. 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 heat stroke 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 fox in a forest fire Do we have a half f fox up on the wall here No No There 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 caduva, 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 lean-away. 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 of the kind of information that 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. Phubbs's Parlor

I'm sure there are others, but now that you have Mrs. Phubbs's 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

Pluck and grunt means ham and eggs, chicks on a raft is eggs on toast

bloodhound in the hay means hot dog with sauerkraut, and frog sticks means french fries

Hounds on an island is frankenbeans, 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

are all 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. signals that the auditory nerve can understand and then send to the brain

But when we speak, the inner ear is picking up eardrum vibrations in addition to vibrations

from inside your body. So 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 bold 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