Every language, every culture, every era has its own slang, and as these terms come and go, language expands and becomes more colorful. The proof is in the work of Jonathon Green, a.k.a. “Mister Slang,” who’s been collecting and defining slang for over 17 years. His Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which features terms from 1500 onward, currently has 135,000 definitions and counting. In his words, “What slang really does is show us at our most human.”
Let’s revisit some truly terrific slang terms from history, as adapted from the above episode of The List Show on YouTube. And while technically the title of this list is “slang from the last century,” we’re going to stretch that a little and go all the way back to the 1900s. Hop in your automobubble, hang on to your tighty-whiteys, and let’s motor!
1. Ampersand
Let’s kick things off at the beginning of the 20th century with the word ampersand. We know it as a punctuation mark that evolved from the Latin word et, meaning “and.” We also know that in the early 19th century, it was considered the 27th letter of the alphabet after Z. Because it was still read as “and,” the alphabet ended with “X, Y, Z, and and,” which was kind of awkward and confusing. So people started to say “and per se and” to separate it out, and that phrase eventually became the word ampersand.
In the 1900s, ampersand was also slang for the butt. Because, as the 27th letter of the alphabet, it came behind all the letters.
2. Automobubble
The first cars debuted in the late 19th century, so it was only a matter of time before people came up with cool colloquialisms to refer to their cruisers. Automobubble and automobuzzard were two informal synonyms for car the early 1900s. And fun fact, the term ambulance-chasing in reference to lawyers dates back to that era, too.
3. Strop One’s Beak
There are so many slang terms for hanky-panky that don’t require you to ever utter the word sex. In 1900, a man doing the deed could have said he was “stropping his beak.” Strop was a verb meaning “to sharpen,” and beak was slang for penis.
4, 5, 6. Ack, Emma, and Pip Emma
Let’s fast-forward to the 1910s. At that time, telephone operators used the terms pip emma and ack emma to signal p.m. and a.m., respectively. They originated with the military—ack stood for a, pip for p, and emma for m. The phrases eventually jumped from the phone lines and gained wider usage as alternatives to afternoon and morning.
7. Crivens
The colorful interjection crivens was how people in the 1910s expressed surprise or fright. It was probably coined as an alternative to “Christ!” with the latter half potentially coming from “Heavens!”
8. San Fairy Ann
Want to express that you don’t care like you’re from the early 20th century? Use the phrase san fairy ann, which is basically the equivalent of saying “whatever.” The phrase originated with English-speaking World War I soldiers who phoneticized the French expression ça ne fait rien, meaning “it doesn’t matter.”
9. Knee Dusters
In the 1920s, flappers raised hemlines to heights previously considered indecent. Their short (at least for the time) dresses were given the nickname knee dusters. Interestingly, the term flapper is much older than the 1920s: According to the OED, it first popped up in the late 1880s to describe teenaged girls, especially, as an 1889 slang dictionary put it, ones who were “trained to vice.”
You May Also Like …
Add Mental Floss as a preferred news source!
10. Scofflaw
The word scofflaw was created by combining scoff, “to speak derisively, mock, jeer” with law, and it means exactly what it sounds like: “a person who proudly flouts the law.” It entered the lexicon in 1924 with help from a man named Delcevare King, who held a contest to pick a name for the rule-breakers who imbibed during Prohibition. For the rest of the ’20s, scofflaw was used to describe people who drank alcohol in addition to indulging in other illicit activities.
11. Zozzled
Prohibition didn’t really stop people from getting sloshed, nor did it stop them from coining creative terms to describe the pastime. Among them was zozzled, which unfortunately didn’t last beyond that era. Then again, neither did Prohibition.
12. Floss
In that 1930s, the words floss or flossing were synonymous with flirting or showing off, especially about one’s possessions.
Here’s a fun fact: Although dentists were recommending the use of floss in the mid-1930s, the verb floss, a.k.a. what dentists recommend you do between your teeth, is surprisingly recent—according to the OED, that meaning didn’t pop up until the 1970s.
13. Abyssinia
If you say “I’ll be seeing you” really fast, you get abyssinia, a term popularized by teens of the 1930s. A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess loved it; he even included it in his unpublished dictionary of slang, describing it as “so Joyceanly satisfying that it is sometimes hard to resist.”
14. Boondoggle
The word boondoggle has gone through quite an evolution. It originally referred to brightly colored lanyard bracelets made by the Boy Scouts. In 1935, the term took on a more derisive connotation when The New York Times reported that the federal Works Progress Administration spent more than $3 million on various activities for the unemployed, including dance lessons and “the making of ‘boon doggles.’” The lessons were given to unemployed teachers in the hope that they could then instruct children in poor areas, but critics felt it was a waste of taxpayer money. Now, if something is a boondoggle, it’s usually an unnecessary, wasteful expense, mainly perpetrated by the government.
15. Ameche
This term dates back to 1939, when actor Don Ameche played Alexander Graham Bell in a biopic creatively titled The Story of Alexander Graham Bell. The actor’s performance must have been incredible, because Ameche ended up becoming a slang term for telephone in the early 1940s.
16. Salt and Pepper
Of the many slang terms for marijuana, salt and pepper is among the most delightful (and head-scratching). Where exactly the term came from isn’t clear, but it got a boost from jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow in his 1946 memoir, Really the Blues. Other pot-related synonyms from the ’40s include yesca, birdwood, and panatella.
17. Snafu
While the military slang term snafu might seem like a made-up word devised by homesick troops, it’s actually an acronym that stands for “situation normal: all fouled up”—though you’re free to substitute the more profane f-word for fouled.
18, 19, 20, 21. Atomized, Bagged, Incognito, and Skunky
The ’50s had fantastic slang. Take, for example, the number of ways to say you were drunk: among them, atomized, bagged, incognitoed, and skunky.
22. Passion Pit
Drive-in movie theaters peaked in the 1950s—there were more than 4000 across the United States by the end of the decade. Yes, you could go there and see a cheap B-movie with your friends, but drive-ins were also the place for teens in heat to bring a date. And thanks to all of those high-school sweethearts locking lips behind the wheel of their Ford Thunderbirds, these outdoor theaters quickly became known as passion pits.
23, 24, 25. Squaresville, Cubesville, and Endsville
Lots of ’50s slang involved slapping a -ville at the end of a well-known term. For example, you could take square and cube, which were both used to describe a boring person, and amplify them to encompass an entire fictional town full of dullards. That ho-hum co-worker of yours who barely says a word? He’s from Squaresville. Your uncle who keeps telling you to get a haircut? He’s the mayor of Cubesville.
On the other end of the spectrum, there was endsville, which the Oxford English Dictionary describes as a fictional place full of all the good things (and people) in life—like a town where your favorite bands and restaurants reside.
26. A-Go-Go
Case in point: a-go-go. In French, à gogo translates to “galore,” so the famous Parisian discotheque Whisky à Gogo literally means Whisky Galore. The spot was so popular among cool, stylish youths that English speakers started using a-go-go to describe anyone or anything that was also cool and stylish—or just as lively as the place itself.
27. Bogart
Humphrey Bogart’s film performances made such an impression that his surname became slang in two separate senses during the 1960s. One, popularized by Black Americans, meant “to coerce” or “to intimidate”—inspired by Bogart’s habit of playing tough guys. To bogart a (marijuana) joint, meanwhile, meant to selfishly hog it, a nod to how often Bogart smoked cigarettes on screen (and his tendency to take especially long drags).
28. Noodge
Here’s a word that’s really fun to say: If someone tells you “quit noodging,” they want you to stop pestering or complaining. The word evolved from the Yiddish word nudyen, meaning “to bore or pester.” And if you were the kind of person who tended to pester or complain fairly often, you might get labeled a nudnik—a Yiddish term for an annoying person, which gained popularity in the early 20th century.
29. Couch Potato
If you spent too much time in front of the television in the 1970s, your parents probably would have called you a “couch potato.” The term was coined in 1976 and may have come from another TV-related diss, boob tuber.
30. Guilt Trip
If you’ve ever had someone shame you into feeling bad about something you did—or didn’t—do, you’ve had a guilt trip laid upon you. The OED dates the phrase back to 1972’s Any Minute I Can Split, a novel by Judith Rossner, where a character states that “nobody’s sending me on any guilt trip over my money,” but it had been used earlier in print in 1970 by Bernardine Dohrn of the Weather Underground radicals group.
31, 32. Tighty-Whities and Wedgie
Wedgie once referred to a shoe with a thick sole but took on more sinister connotations in the 1970s: Playground bullies would grab someone’s tighty-whities—another ’70s-era term—and deliver a wedgie by pulling that underwear right up into their butt crack.
33, 34. Wastoid and Burnout
If you grew up in the 1980s—or just watched the first season of Stranger Things—then you might be familiar with the word wastoid, a slang term for a person who does so many drugs that they’ve essentially become worthless. And if you’ve ever used it yourself, you have John Hughes to thank. The screenwriter and filmmaker coined the term for The Breakfast Club: Andrew tells Bender, “Yo, wastoid, you’re not going to blaze up in here.” And if you wanted to diss an avid drug user in the 1970s, you could have gone with burnout.
35. Valley Girl
The 1980s were the era of the Valley girl—well-off young women initially from California’s San Fernando Valley who loved all things material and were for sure perceived to be, like, totally ditzy because there was, like, a lot of uptalk going on? The term valley girl was popularized by a 1982 Frank Zappa song featuring his daughter Moon. Valley Girls’ slang was known as Valleyspeak, and tons of it caught on far beyond the Valley.
36. Bod
According to the OED, the word bod dates all the way back to the ’80s—the 1780s, that is. A clipped form of body, it also refers more generally to a person, and in the early days may have been a shortened form of bodach, a Scottish word for a specter. On college campuses in the 1960s, it came to mean “an attractive person.” And when a girl asks Ferris “How’s your bod?” in 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, what she’s actually asking is: “How are you feeling?”
37. Grody
Grody was initially spelled groaty, in the mid-1960s, and it’s basically used to describe something that’s slovenly, dirty, or super gross. If something is really and truly terrible, Valley girls might have described it as grody to the max.
38. Tubular
Tubular, from the Latin tubulus, initially referred to things that were shaped like a tube, but the word took on a new meaning entirely in the 1980s—this one related to waves. Surfers in the U.S. used it to refer to hollow, cresting waves perfect for riding, and soon, it was used to discuss anything that was pretty much perfect.
39. Boo-Yah
When boo-yah first popped up in the late 1980s, it was used as an exclamation to emphasize suddenness or surprise. But in the ’90s, the word became forever associated with incredible sports plays thanks to ESPN anchor Stuart Scott, who frequently used it to punctuate his commentary. If you drained a three-pointer, scored a touchdown, or hit a home run in the 1990s, you or a teammate likely shouted, “Boo-yah!”
40. Chillax
Chillax began in a very ‘90s way: In an online forum discussing Quentin Tarantino in December 1994, just two months after Pulp Fiction came out. WordHistories.net did track down one earlier citation, though—the word chillaxin appeared in a 1992 newspaper.
41. Noob
Noob is a term for a beginner—as in newbie—that was born from the then-newfangled commercial internet. It made its first written appearance in 1995, in a Usenet forum devoted to the band Phish. “I really dug the one guy’s idea of having the noobs send along a small gift with the blanks so that’s what i’m gonna do,” one user wrote. If you didn’t know what ASL stood for on ICQ, you were likely a noob.
42. Regift
Regifting was a thing long before the ’90s: The word was first recorded as a noun during the time of Oliver Cromwell. But it was only in 1995 that the term found real popularity thanks to an episode of Seinfeld. The actor who played the “regifter”? A young Bryan Cranston.
43. Dumpster Fire
There was a time when dumpster fire was used to refer to a literal fire in a dumpster, but it took on a less literal meaning in 2008, when it was used for the first time to refer to a seriously disastrous situation in a pro wrestling Usenet group: the animated movie Shrek the Third: “Shrek 3 was a dumpster fire, don’t get me started,” one user wrote.
44. Nomophobia
Anyone who’s accidentally left home without their phone will understand this term for the anxiety you feel when you don’t have your phone with you. Nomophobia, which first appeared in the Daily Mail in 2008, combines no with the mo from mobile and the phobia from, well, phobia.
45. Showrooming
When you think of what a showroom is, your mind probably goes to a place where goods are displayed—like kitchen appliances, maybe, or cars. The word showroom dates back to 1616, and in 2009, someone on Twitter added -ing to create showrooming: going to a store to check out merch before buying it online, where the price is usually lower.