flubdub

English

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

flubdub (countable and uncountable, plural flubdubs)

(countable) A buffoon.
- 1897, Owen Wister, Lin McLean‎^[1]:
  I told Mr. Perkins I wasn't a-going to, an' he— I think he is a flubdub anyway."
- 1911, Eugene Field, The Holy Cross and Other Tales‎^[2]:
  Rumpty-tumpty, pimplety-pan— / The flubdub courted a catamaran / But timplety-topplety, timpity-tare— / The flubdub wedded the big blue bear!
(uncountable) Trivial matters; nonsense.
- 1912, Samuel G. Blythe, The Fun of Getting Thin‎^[3]:
  I have no mission or message or any flubdub of that kind.
- 1915, James Branch Cabell, The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck‎^[4]:
  Only they sent the father to the Senate and gave him columns of flubdub and laid him out in state when he died—and they poured kerosene upon the son and burned him alive.
- 1914, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, The Precipice‎^[5]:
  Sorrow came to her afterward, disappointment, struggle, but never so heavy and dragging a pain as she knew that Christmas Day. She had been trying in many unsuspected ways to relieve her father's grim misery, — a misery of which his gaunt face told the tale, — and although he had said that he wished for "no flubdub about Christmas," she really could not resist making some recognition of a day which found all other homes happy.