flubdub

flubdub (countable and uncountable, plural flubdubs)

1. (countable) A buffoon.
   • 1897, Owen Wister, Lin McLean‎:

     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:

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

2. (uncountable) Trivial matters; nonsense.
   • 1912, Samuel G. Blythe, The Fun of Getting Thin‎:

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

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

     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:

     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.