flubdub

[Jonathan Lighter]

HDAS includes this in the uncommon sense of "a blockhead; idiot," from 1909. Preliminary ad hoc electronic research, however, adds earlier exx. and suggests the definition be expanded to include "an inept or useless person," with the overarching subject label, "Esp. _Stu._"  (All told, cf. "dub" and the modern "dweeb".)

  1888 Robert Grant _Jack in the Bush_ (Boston: Jordan, Marsh) 252: Singing the praises of rowing and base-ball, and the manly art of self-defence, in a way adapted to make Max experience shame and envy, and ask himself "Am I not a flub-dub?

  1891 Grace Livingston Furniss _A Box of Monkeys_ (N.Y.: Harper) 185: You know what a flubdub is, Duchess?...A flubdub is a no count fellow who don't pay his poker debts; and a jay is the same, only more so.

  1898 Owen Wister _Lin McLean_ (N.Y.: Harper) 131: I told Mr. Perkins I wasn't a-goin' to....I think he's a flubdub, anyway.

  1915 in Theodore Roosevelt _Letters_ VIII (Cambridge: Harvard, 1954)  922: Supported by all the hyphenated Americans, by the solid flubdub and pacifist vote.

  1918 in John Dos Passos _The Fourteenth Chronicle_ (Boston: Gambit, 1973)  178: Written by some prudish French flubdub of a professorial prig.

  1980 Stanley Kauffmann _Before My Eyes_ (N.Y.:  Harper) 52: Keaton is the flubdub son of a Wall Street tycoon who inadvertently saves the tycoon from ruin.

  The more usual sense is "twaddle," app. from the 1870s.

  JL




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