Know Your Onions? Try This Quiz on Old Slang Terms

The 1909 book “Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English Slang and Phrase” includes the term “bags O’ mystery” for sausages. The evocative phrase recalls how pork sausages used to be made with the dregs of the pig plus all sorts of filler, meaning that it was often unclear what was in the sausage you were eating.

Perhaps because it’s considered a boring or ordinary drink, a glass of water has come to be known by many different slang terms over the years. “Dog soup,” “city juice,” and “Adam’s ale” have all been used as amusing ways to describe a glass of water. In fact, you might have actually sipped your “dog soup” through your “sauce box,” which is slang for “mouth.”

In 1953, former semi-pro pitcher David Mullany watched his son and friends play baseball in the backyard. Instead of a bat and a baseball, the kids used a broomstick and a perforated golf ball. Mullany was inspired to create a plastic ball that would make it easier for children to throw curve balls. The result was the Wiffle Ball, which was named after the neighborhood slang for striking out.

In the 1930s, “boffo” referred to any performance that was a resounding success. The word itself most likely got its start in the comedy world, where it described any line that had the audience roaring with laughter. Eventually, it came to be used for any successful performance, as in, "You gave a boffo concert last night, old chap!"

The "morbs" in question here might refer to morbid, as in morbid thoughts of darkness or sadness. The saying generally referred to a temporary state of sorrow that passed over someone, but hopefully didn’t linger too long.

The American diner has long had its own lexicon of food lingo, much of which comes from the 1950s, when diners were all the rage. “Frog sticks” was a term used to describe french fries, while "hounds on an island" referred to franks and beans, and "yellow blanket on a dead cow" was a fancy (if graphic) way to describe a cheeseburger.

For flapper women who were becoming increasingly liberated during the Roaring ‘20s, an engagement ring could be seen as a handcuff. In the same vein, the slang term for a wedding ring was “manacle,” while "out on parole" referred to being divorced.

Operation Chrome Dome was a U.S. Air Force mission in the 1960s, in which B-52s flew from the Mediterranean Sea to the Arctic Ocean. The phrase was adopted by young people to refer to shiny bald heads, presumably as they resembled the nose of a plane. By extension, the term has also been used to denote intellectuals who are often imagined to have large bald heads due to their enormous brains.

If you are said to “know your onions,” then you are considered very knowledgeable about a certain subject. The phrase first began cropping up in American newspapers in the 1920s. Although theories linking the slang to famed British lexicographer C. T. Onions have been proposed, the truth seems to be that American youth in the 1920s just enjoyed creating quirky new phrases.

If you sustained a black eye back in the 19th century, people might have said you “copped a mouse.” The word "cop" can mean getting or receiving something, but why mouse? Well, many mice are a sort of bluish-grey or black color, and are about the same general size as the bruise from a black eye.

In the 19th century, traveling salesmen would hawk all kinds of bogus “cure-alls,” many of which contained dangerous chemicals or drugs. One particularly famous concoction was "snake oil," and its failure to work as advertised made "snake oil" and "snake oil salesman" common slang terms for scams and scam artists.

The slang word “jive” has several meanings dating back to the 1940s (including to dance), but by the 1970s it had come to be associated with chatting or talking. When the term “jive turkey” was coined in the Black community in the ‘70s, it referred to someone who would ramble on pretending to be an expert on something they didn’t really know anything about.

Maybe it was the hush-hush nature of drinking in the Prohibition era, but 1920s America had a lot of different terms to describe someone who had imbibed a bit much. In addition to soapy-eyed, canned up, or zozzled, a drunk person could be described as striped, squiffed, owled, full as a tick, or even seeing snakes.

Young people in the 1920s loved to invent new phrases related to animals, such as “the cat’s pajamas” and “the bee’s knees.” Both phrases entered into common usage to mean something of the best quality, and have endured to this day. The phrase might not have originated to mean an actual cat but rather could refer to a fashionable young person, as in the phrase “cool cat.”

The phrase “don’t have a cow” means “calm down.” The term has been around for a long time, but its origins are unclear. The British have a similar phrase, “don’t have kittens,” but the reasons for these animal-based terms are obscure. Today, “don’t have a cow” is most commonly associated with the cartoon character Bart Simpson, who has used it as a catchphrase since the 1990s.

A “knuckle sandwich” is a slang term for punching someone in the mouth with a closed fist. The phrase likely arises from the idea that when throwing a punch, the “sandwich” is the hand and is heading into your mouth, like a real sandwich. It’s unclear where the term first originated, but it was popularized in American movies where small-time crooks or kids threatened to mete out punishments in the form of a knuckle sandwich.

In ‘90s speak, The phrase "take a chill pill" meant a command for someone to stop, breathe, and relax for a moment. Of course, if they said it dismissively in the middle of a fight, you might be forced to challenge their demand with a pointed "as if!" or even a "talk to the hand!"

The slang word “psych” has been used in many different guises to relate to matters of the mind. A shortening of the word “psychological,” the term was most often used in the 1970s as an exclamation by teenagers after they tricked someone. For example, “It’s liver and onions for dinner… psych!”

The slang term “cutting a rug” refers to dancing very energetically and has been in use since at least the 1920s. The phrase is thought to have arisen because those who danced vigorously tended to wear holes in the carpet beneath their feet. It’s likely that the freeform ways of dancing that emerged in the 1920s were considered more likely to “cut a rug” than traditional ballroom dances.

The term “flip your wig” describes someone who is extremely angry. The earliest usage of the phrase was in the early 1950s, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that it became common slang, most often used by young people about an older authority figure. The phrase is also commonly seen as “flip your lid” — both versions conjure images of someone so angry their head explodes.

The slang terms “boogie” and “get down” were commonly used throughout the 1970s to refer to dancing. It wasn’t the first time the word “boogie” was used in a musical sense, however; there was also an early form of 1920s blues music known as “boogie-woogie.” The term “boogie” may stem from the West African word “bogi,” which means “to dance.”