flubdub

plural flubdubs

1. countableA buffoon.

   I told Mr. Perkins I wasn't a-going to, an' he— I think he is a flubdub anyway."

   1897, Owen Wister, Lin McLean

   1 more example

   Rumpty-tumpty, pimplety-pan— / The flubdub courted a catamaran / But timplety-topplety, timpity-tare— / The flubdub wedded the big blue bear!

   1911, Eugene Field, The Holy Cross and Other Tales

2. uncountableTrivial matters; nonsense.

   I have no mission or message or any flubdub of that kind.

   1912, Samuel G. Blythe, The Fun of Getting Thin

   2 more examples

   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.

   1915, James Branch Cabell, The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck

   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.

   1914, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, The Precipice