For those who don’t know, I work part time at a library of rare books and manuscripts. It often involves stamping books, organizing magazines, opening the mail, filing receipts, and loading packages into the freezer. Recently, it involved putting a giant collection of Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books in numerical order. They are small 3.5″ x 5″ books published in Girard, Kansas, during the early- to mid-20th Century. The books include everything from Shakespeare and Ibsen plays to the U.S. Constitution and French-to-English guides. One that caught my eye was #56, A Dictionary of American Slang.

Included in it were some things that we still use today, like geezer, gold digger, high jack, and hot dog as an exclamation. But there were also some things that I have never heard of, and some of the definitions were just as strange. So, without further ado, some examples of ~1920s slang:

• absotively – absolutely and positively
• acknowledge the corn – admit responsibility for
• Adam’s ale – water
• all to the mustard – excellent
• almighty dollar – money, god of America
• applesauce – blah, tripe, nonsense, foolish talk
• go to the bad – attend Sunday movies, dance, or otherwise offend the Rotary Methodist god
• birthday suit – nature’s garb
• cake eater – tea-hound, lounge-lizard, lady-bug
• snake’s hips – something excellent
• cracker – poor white, as in Georgia
• dude – one who follows “What Men Are Wearing” in the theater programs
• flumadiddle – humbug, flummery, nonsense
• full of prunes – you’re crazy, you’re wrong
• gibble-gabble, mulligatawny – foolish talk
• to ride the goat – to be initiated into a secret society
• fluzie – a daughter of joy, prostitute
• Heavens! – formerly, god’s resident; now, an expletive
• hotsy-totsy, tootsie-wootsie – a girl all to the mustard, all O.K.
• izzum-wizzum – hotsy-totsy, red hot sweetie
• Jericho (to send one to) – Hell, or Hoboken
• justice – slang for what is obtained in legal courts
• late unpleasantness – the last war; long used for the Civil War, in 200,000 AD it will be used of the most recent war
• low-brow – an average person; one who prefers the poetry of Eddie Guest
• Bible Marathon – the latest American indoor sport, in which both Testaments are read aloud in relays at breakneck speed, to the glory of God
• mollycoddle – excessively effeminate person
• mossback – a fossil, dodo, conservative stand-patter
• to get one’s nanny – to get one’s goat
• necktie partie – a hanging bee, lynching
• to pass on – Christian Science euphemism for “to die.” It has become general throughout these Rotaried states. Nobody has died since Christ; all the rest have “passed on.”
• paste – to strike a blow; “I’ll paste you in the bean”
• piffle – nonsense, twaddle, applesauce, stewed rhubarb
• poor white trash – a 100% free and un-terrified Nordic financial and mental pauper in the Southern States, whose family never owned slaves. If a child of poor white trash becomes President, historians will at once raise his ancestors to the aristocracy.
• pop the question – to propose marriage; to dare congual shipwreck
• primrose path – road to Hell, anything pleasant
• puritan – one scrupulous about the morals of others; one who holds that the pleasant is always wicked
• red – Communist, Socialist, Bolshevik, radical, prohibitionist, anti-prohibitionist, or member of any belief different from yours
• right-o – annoying, the British expression of approval
• rough diamond – an uncalcimined daddy; a rich man who eats peas with his knife 
• rum row – the liquor-laden fleet 12 miles out
• Sam Hill – the devil, as in “what the Sam Hill?” Sam’s father was Bunker Hill, shortened to Bunk Hill
• stork – long-legged bird, purveying all human babies. In the U.S. the cabbage and rose bush methods have become slightly obscene; the biological is verboten. The Stork, Santa Clause, and Yahweh live in St. George Washington’s cherry tree.
• strawberry blonde – red head, carrot top
• V spot – five dollar bill
• whangdoodle – mythical creature, akin to the gymnascutus, leg shorter on one side than the other, to let him feed n a hillside; nonsense