Our earliest evidence of its use, from 1834, very helpfully provides an explanation of the word’s German origins: the cat’s misery. The word katzenjammer had been in use for close to a century before it was appropriated as part of the name of an early 20th century comic strip, The Katzenjammer Kids. Santa Cruz (California) Weekly Sentinel, 17 Aug. “That his speech will abound in scurrillity and falsehood we are aware, judging from the one delivered in Sacramento and San Francisco, in which the Union and the Bulletin were literally covered with filth from the slum-gullion of his mud-valve.” The word also appears to have had some currency in the 19th century, little-remarked upon by dictionaries, as a synonym of “nonsense,” as seen in the alliterative headline from The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1875: “Hifalutin Legal Hogwash, and Slobbery, Sentimental Slumgullion About That White-Souled Woman.” It is not entirely clear which meaning of slumgullion came first, although it seems possible that it was the one having to do with a disagreeable drink, as there were newspaper reports in the early 1850s of a town with the curious name of Slumgullion Bar. Prior to describing a meat stew the word had been used to refer to “an insipid drink,” “the mixed blood, oil, and salt water that collect on the decks of a ship while the valuable parts of a whale are being handled,” and several other unfortunate things. Slumgullion is a nasty-sounding word, and for most of its time on earth it has been what we might refer to as eponymous (“suitably named”), for the things it has described have been similarly unpleasant. The threat about retaining all Mexico is mere flummadiddle, of course. In the 1840s it settled down a bit, and began to see service in the role that it was obviously born to play, which is as a synonym for fiddle-faddle, folderol, or flapdoodle. O folly, fudge, and flummadiddle! We shall wait and see what next. (Jumping up.) Jupiter! thunder! a tete-a-tete with a vengeance! O, you etarnal varmint of a bat-I’ll show you how to flumadiddle around me! 1827įollowing its sartorial beginnings, flummadiddle began to be employed in other fashions it comes up as a single-word headline for an article in a Massachusetts newspaper, The Salem Gazette, in 1829, without any apparent relation to the text of the article (which is about a walking stick) perhaps the editors of that paper simply liked the way the word looked.īy the middle of the 19th century flummadiddle was used variously as a verb or as an interjection: Boston Spectator and Ladies’ Album, 21 Apr. My stature is neither of predominating height, or insignificant brevity, and having observed that a redundance of ‘flemmediddle’ (as it is now called) is tolerable only on a lady of the first dimensions, and that a dress for the street without any addition of ornament looks rather a la Cinderella, or like a morning habiliment, a neat, appropriate trimming will be visible upon whatever I may wear, of my own work, (what a sneer, Miss Araminta! sneers do not become ladies, gentlemen may sneer as much as they please,)…. … looking down, found I had disarrayed my fair partner of lots of roses, and two yards of flounce or flummediddle, which skirted the lower part of her dress. It has gone through a number of meanings and spellings since it first began being used in the early 19th century, with the earliest use apparently referring to a frill or fringe, as found on a dress. Definition: something foolish or worthlessįlummadiddle is the sort of word that rolls nicely off the tongue, and even if people with whom you use the word don’t quite know what it means the conversation will be the richer for its presence.
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