balloon juice

All this underscores that the hyperactive posturing from Bryan and others on the dump is so much balloon juice. They’ll say anything to hoodwink voters into believing the dump isn’t inevitable, when all signs point otherwise.

1992 December 22, “So much balloon juice: Hushing up dissent in the House”, in Las Vegas Review-Journal, page 8B

Iacocca’s book is filled with managerial balloon juice. “The only way you can motivate people is to communicate with them.” […] He exhibits general ignorance of business fundamentals.

2007, P. J. O'Rourke, Give War a Chance, page 144

The shiftless, too lazy to keep up with the pace, and the incompetent oftentimes shrewd business men, but indifferent pharmacist, are compelled to purchase the ready-made articles to keep in touch with the ever increasing list of physicians who are too tired to do their own thinking, and who are willing that the patient should take his chances with the wonderful elixir of balloon juice recommended so highly by Prof. X. of the College of Timbuctoo, and of the composition of which they have not the slightest conception.

1897, “A druggist on the situation”, in The Pharmaceutical Era, volume XVIII, number 3, page 65

balloon juice lowerer a total abstainer from liquor LIT: a soda water drinker

[1986, Richard A. Spears, The Slang and Jargon of Drugs and Drink, page 22

We drink chastely—balloon juice (seltzer). Now a British pub is all about booze. I don’t recall people eating much in pubs beyond bangers on sticks, stolid pork pie, Ryvita spears smeared with Marmite.

2009 October 31, Gina Mallet, “Recalling classics”, in National Post, Don Mills, Ontario, page TO 4