no duff
other.— «L/Cpl Steven Jones, 25—an Army passenger on the plane—yelled, “No duff, no duff, we are on fire, we are on fire,” before communication was lost. “No duff” is a military term used to indicate a real emergency instead of a drill.» —“http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/campaigns/our_boys/article988834.ece” by John Coles Sun (United Kingdom) Apr. 2, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Loretta in Shreveport, Louisiana, wants to know what lexical and dialectal clues linguists look for when guessing where someone is from. She also wonders: Do people with long careers in the military or who grew up in a military family have a...
A hundred years ago, suffragists lobbied to win women the right to vote. Linguistically speaking, though, suffrage isn’t about “suffering.” It’s from a Latin word that involves voting. Plus: military cadences often include...
We had a similar expression when I was a teenager in Montreal in the early 1970s. “No guff” meant “I’m not kidding you” or “I’m telling you the truth”.