Hot as Flugens

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Squire Babcock, and I’m calling from Murray, Kentucky.

What would you like to talk with us about?

My maternal grandmother used a word that I’ve never heard anywhere else, and I’ve asked all sorts of people.

I was a professor in the English department at Murray State for 25 years, and I asked a whole bunch of people.

But my grandmother, who was probably born right around the turn of the century, the 1900s, 1900 or so, and was the daughter of a German immigrant, would, when we went to visit her, when it was summertime, she would occasionally say, it’s hot as flugins.

Or she was telling a story, she’d say, it was hot as flugins.

And I have always been curious about the word and can never have never been able to find where it’s from, what it means and so forth.

Or maybe even how it’s spelled, huh?

Exactly.

I’ve just spelled it phonetically.

F-L-U-G-E-N-S is what it sounds like to me.

What i I can still hear her saying it.

I don’t know what you know, where in Fludens is Fludens is a question that I’ve come up with for you.

Where in Flugens is Flugens. That’s a good question.

Your grandmother wasn’t alone in using that expression.

It goes back to the 1830s, and it’s kind of a euphemism for hell.

It’s an all-around youth emphazer and comparative.

So you might say, besides saying hot is Flugens, you might say making money like Flugens or ran like Flugens.

And there’s the inverse as well.

You might say it’s cold is blue Flugens, blue Flugens being a common variation as well.

It shows up in full force in the 1830s in an anecdote widely reprinted in newspapers.

Now, just a little bit before that in the 1830s, there was a little dictionary published in a few newspapers starting in the Augusta, Georgia Courier called the Cracker Dictionary.

By Cracker, they mean white southerner when cracker was applied to themselves in an inoffensive way.

And it just so happens that that little dictionary in May of 1830 includes the word flugens, and they define it.

And basically, they define it as fire and kindling.

So flugens, as far as they’re concerned, means something that’s hot, something that’s on fire.

So if you’re saying hot as flugens, you’re saying hot as a little bit of fire and kindling.

How did they spell it in that dictionary?

F-L-U-G-E-N-S.

Although over the years, over the 150 plus years since that little dictionary, you’ll find it spelled, oh, 10, 15 different ways because that’s not one of those words that’s often written down and more often passed from mouth to ear.

Yeah. Yes. That’s really cool to hear. It makes some sense. My grandmother was from a sort of principled and careful family and background.

And so they might have not used the word hell instead.

They might have, you know, adopted flugins to be more proper.

Thank you for bringing this to light and sharing your memory of it with us and everyone else.

Thanks for finding out about it for me.

That answers a long-lived question for me.

So appreciate it.

All right.

Take care of yourself.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

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