flat adj.1
naïve, unsophisticated.
![[UK]](/static/img/flags/uk.png "United Kingdom") | Nest of Ninnies 12: All such, say I, that use flat foolerie, Beare this, beare more; this flat foole’s companie. | |
| ‘A Kicksey Winsey’ in Works (1869) II 39: No wiser than flat fooles they be. | |
| ‘A Fore-Castle Song’ Songs Comic and Satyrical 96: Odd Lingos Musicians write in, / Concerning Flats, Sharps, and all that; / We Seamen are sharp in our fighting, / And as to the Frenchmen they’re flat. | |
| Pettyfogger Dramatized I vi: Blast me, i’m flat—dam’me, ’tis all my eye, Betty Martin. | |
| Key to the Picture of the Fancy going to a Fight 7: A young man of nineteen, who has been flat enough to lay the man of colour [i.e. ex-slave-turned-prizefighter Bill Richmond], that ‘he is an ancient Briton!’. | |
| An Uncle Too Many I ii: Famous! if he is but flat enough to believe it. | |
| Satirist (London) 10 May 501/3: ‘If they had not been flat fish do you think they would have come near the hook?’. | |
![[US]](/static/img/flags/us.png "United States") | Charcoal Sketches in Schele de Vere Americanisms (1871) 602: Not to hurt a gentleman’s feelings and to make him feel flat afore the country . | |
| ‘Characters of Freshmen’ in In Cap and Gown (1889) 176: The Flat Freshman [...] putteth his cap on the wrong way. | |
| (con. 1840s–50s) London Labour and London Poor I 310/2: The place was well-known to the monkry, and you was reckoned flat if you hadn’t been there. | |
 | Sydney Sportsman (Surrey Hills, NSW) 6 Nov. 4/2: [of a pak-a-pu ‘parlour’] he manager of the joint [...] has placed before him a list of every combination marke ooff by the flat investors. |
In compounds
1. a fool, a dullard.
![[Ire]](/static/img/flags/ire.png "Ireland") | Wild Oats (1792) 49: You’d disgust her, you flat fish. | |
| Eng. Spy II 368: Meer Cyprian traders, captain, from the Gulf of Venus, engaged in gudgeon hawling, or on the look-out for flat fish. | |
| ‘Catalogue of Odd Fish’ in Fleet-Street Collection 8: We shouldn’t miss much of [off?] the mark, / If we set down the clients as flat fish. | |
| Peter Ploddy and Other Oddities 149: A werry flat sort of a fish, that chap is. | |
| Back to the Woods 13: I made up my mind one day I’d run down to the Flatfish Factory and drag a few honest dollars away from the Bookmakers. |
2. a beggar’s or confidence trickster’s prey.
| letter in Times 8 Dec. n.p.: The invunerability of ‘Fishmonger’s Hall,’ or the Crock-odile Mart for gudgeons, flat-fish, and pigeons, is likely soon to be put to the proof. | |
| ‘Life of a Vagabond’ in II (1979) 63: On flatfish I contrive to live though some call me a shark. | |
| Seven Curses of London 407: This is the way Dodger angles for ‘flat-fish’ of tender age. |
3. a prostitute.
| ‘Randy Mots of London’ in Libertine’s Songster in Spedding & Watt (eds) I 139: The fishmonger’s a friskly blade, / And though he dearly likes a maid, / For any flat-fish he’s the blade, / And thinks he’s not by one done. |