beak off

English

Etymology

• (complain; boast; yammer): Using beak as slang for a person's mouth.

Verb

beak off (third-person singular simple present beaks off, present participle beaking off, simple past and past participle beaked off) (slang)

1. To complain.
   • 2005, Adrian Michael Kelly, Down Sterling Road, page 87:

     Stop beaking off at everyone all the —
     The first pitch blows right by.

   • 2016, Jean Oram, Tequila and Candy Drops:

     She'd been an absolute bear all day yesterday--to the point where Devon had shoved her off her zip-line platform when she'd started beaking off at him for not pointing out the moose he'd seen in the first section.

   • 2018, Fran Kimmel, No Good Asking:

     His dad told him to quit beaking off. We're doing this for your mom, okay. It's Christmas.

2. To boast.
   • 1997, Ronald Mark Chambers, Three Really Nasty Plays, page 172:

     All you do is sit around, scratch your balls, rub your lucky tummy and beak off about how much money you're making!

   • 2009, Stephen Schneider, Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada, page 178:

     During a ballyhooed interview with the Toronto Daily Star, Rocco beaked off that he sometimes sold as many as one thousand cases of whiskey a day.

   • 2011, John Conrad, Scarce Heard Amid the Guns: An Inside Look at Canadian Peacekeeping, page 156:

     When I got to them they said there was a couple of drunk Cambodian soldiers along the outside of the wire firing into the air. When I looked around the corner, I could see them drinking and beaking off [boasting].

   • 2019, A. F. Henley, The Chase and the Catch:

     Beaking off about how you'd never get John to crack... what the fuck does he know, right?

3. To yammer; to blab.
   • 2019, R.W. Laidlaw, Oasis, page 234:

     No one seemed to care that a lowly trooper was beaking off during an officers' meeting: in fact, clearly everyone had been listening to him, not the other way around.

   • 2019, A.F. Henley, Road Trip:

     Nobody should have known it was there, but someone obviously did. Frank or Mitch probably beaked off to the wrong person and they came sniffing around.

   • 2021, Susan Hayes, Mating Fever:

     The cook had used too much of his own product and started beaking off to the wrong people.

4. To be truant; to skip school.
   • 1996, John Sugden, Boxing and Society: An International Analysis, page 102:

     Most attend school reluctantly and some 'beak off' (play truant) regularly.

   • 1998, Robert McLiam Wilson, Ripley Bogle, page 49:

     I beaked off school on the afternoon of one of the most important Orange marches of the year.

   • 2013, Neil Mackay, All the Little Guns Went Bang, Bang, Bang:

     Roger the Dodger is always pulling a swifty and beaking off school – covering his face in his mammy's compact powder to make himself look all ill and deathly pale; using her lippy to put red dots on himself like he's got the measles.