rat hunter
n.— «Rat hunter. Delirium tremens patient who imagines he sees hundreds of rats.» —“Hospital Workers’ Slang and Jargon” by Hospital Workers in New York City. Also, Virginia and Arkansas. in New York City Lexicon of Trade Jargon , 1938-39. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Floordrobe is the new word for an old habit: piling your clothes on the floor instead of putting them away. The Oxford English Dictionary recently added an entry for it, defining floordrobe as “an untidy heap of discarded clothing left on the floor...
When Bebe, a non-native English speaker in Charlotte, North Carolina, moved from England to the United States, she learned that a minor illness isn’t called the lurgy but the crud. In the 1700s, lurgy was used jokingly to refer to “a vague medical...