Green’s Dictionary of Slang

a problem-solving (usu. female) columnist of newspapers and magazines to whom the lovelorn and generally wretched can write and have their letters answered in print or privately; thus the male equivalent, agony uncle.

[1972		Times 27 Apr. 3/1: Pleas for help from young and old made to 'agony aunties' of magazines and newspapers].
1974		Guardian 19 Sept. 13/2: [T]he teenage magazine Petticoat and its agony aunt, Claire Rayner.
1975		P. Makins Evelyn Home Story 9: Perhaps the biggest obstacle the ‘agony aunties’ faced in the ’thirties was that neither the queries they dealt with nor the publications which printed them were taken seriously [OED].
2005		(con. c.1945) A. Wheatle Island Songs (2006) 25: Although his formal duties were with the church, Mr Forbes was also a part-time agony aunt.

1. a piano.

1902		G. Ade in St Paul Globe (MN) 23 Mar. 22/2: He went to Dancing School and learned to play all the ‘Pinafore’ music on the Upright Agony Box.
1904		O. Kildare Good of the Wicked 13: And as to the piano in the back room? [...] I put in that agony-box that they could have a little music or singing with their glass o beer.

2. any form of stringed instrument.

1914		J.C. Lincoln Mr Pratt’s Patients 197: A day’s rest hadn’t done that agony box any good; ’twas worse’n ever, if such a thing’s possible. I never heard such a noise; like the wailing of something dying and dying hard.
1927		Gregg Shorthand Mag. 15 44: They used to call it [i.e. a cello] the ‘agony box’ at home. (Laughter.) [...] I was not allowed to play a phrase, I was not allowed to play a note.
1929		P.B. Kyne Parson of Panamint 259: Promptly at that hour the professor closes down his piano, the fiddler stables his agony box [i.e. a violin] an' the two o' them go home.
2002		Official Site of Martin Taylor 🌐 Just because I was made Professor of Ukelele Studies at Battersea Dogs Home [...] he had to go and be one better [...] Have you heard that racket he plays on that wooden agony box [i.e. a ukelele] of his?

3. a record player, a phonograph.

1917		Munsey’s Mag. 60 498: Can that agony-box, will you?
1929		M.A. Gill Und. Sl. n.p.: Agony box – phonograph.

4. (US) a clarinet.

1936

Reading Times (PA) 29 May 4/8: They are master of the ‘God box’ (a pipe organ), the ‘Sweet Stick’ (a trumpet) , the ‘Agony Box’ (a clarinet) , the ‘Dog House’ (the bass fiddle) and the ‘Coke Stick’ (the saxophone).

5. a radio.

1942		Berrey & Van den Bark Amer. Thes. Sl.
1946		(ref. to 1923) Forum 105-6 894: 1923 [...] was in radio’s early childhood, only two years after American broadcasting had been initiated, when a set was jokingly called an ‘agony box’.
1950		Ellery Queen’s Mystery Mag. 72/2: He asked for the Agony Box so I tuned in. Krindler's broadcast.

1. the section of a newspaper dedicated to special advertisements, particularly those for missing relatives or friends, and thus filled with personal agony; thus agony advertisement.

1854		Courier 28 Mar. 50/3: In time, [...] it would be as much sought after, and as eagerly read, as the ‘agony column’ of the Times.
1859		‘A P. & O.’ Always Ready 203: The polish of Our own Correspondent [was] left untouched. neither had the second, or ‘agony’ column of the ‘Thunderer’ been borrowed.
1868		Tomahawk 19 Dec. 269/2: The Pall Mall Gazette, for the want of something better to discuss, has been moralizing over the agony column of The Times.
1870		L. Oliphant Piccadilly 78: That I should have afterwards changed my mind, and answered the advertisement of the committee, which appeared in the ‘agony’ column of the ‘Times’.
1873		W. Black A Princess of Thule (1874) III 50: And how does she propose to succeed? Pollaky? The ‘Agony’ Column? Placards, or a Bell-man?
1880		Bulletin (Sydney) 26 June 3/1: The ‘agony column’ of the Argus swells daily.
1881		W. Black Beautiful Wretch III 8: There were anonymous appeals to the runaways in agony columns.
1884		Dundee Eve. Teleg. 27 Sept. 3/6: A very trite saying was rather vigorously put in one of the ‘agony’ advertisements yesterday.
1893		W.S. Walsh Literary Curiosities 28: Agony-Column. The name familiarly given to the second column of the first page of the London Times.
1901		A. Binstead More Gal’s Gossip 35: When you glance over the ‘Agony Column’ of the evening newspaper.
1914		N.Y. Tribune 1 Nov. 37/5: Wars may come and battles may urge, but that hardy perennial, the ‘Agony Column’ of ‘The London Times’ remains undisturbed.
1917		F. Packard Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1918) 9: ‘I never read your beastly agony columns,’ said Jimmie Dale.
1924		Mercury (Hobart, Tas.) 31 Dec. 6.6: More than one absorbing article has been written on the agony column of the London ‘Times,’ but our Australian newspapers, too, have their stories of human suffering [...] in their three-line advertisements.
1931		Mail (Adelaide) 11 Apr. 9/4: An agony column advertisment in London newspapers requesting members of the Hoars families to communicate with 87 Fleet Street.

2. a regular newspaper or magazine feature containing readers’ questions about personal problems with replies from a (usu. female) columnist.

1936		Central Queensland Herald (Rockhampton, Qld) 23 Apr. 13/4: The Agony Column [...] My dear Anonymous...
1940		Courier-Mail (Brisbane) 11 Oct. n.p.: [headline] ‘Agony Column’ Barred to Air Force Men.
1975		P. Makins Evelyn Home Story 158: The actual writing style of agony columns has changed quite noticeably over the years [OED].

(US) a clarinet.

1935		Vanity Fair 43:6 73: Among these [nicknames] are agony pipe, wop stick, and licorice stick for clarinet ; plumbing or piston for trumpet; gobble pipe for saxophone; grunt iron for bass horn; dog house for bass viol ; screech box for violin.
1938		Pic (N.Y.) Mar. 7: licking the licorice stick or gob stick. — playing the clarinet. Also known as an agony pipe or wop stick.
1938		Life 8 Aug. 56: In their quieter moments, they discuss Swing with weird words like jive, gut-bucket, dog-house, push-pipe, agony-pipe.
c.1940		‘Benny Goodman in “Swing on This!”’ [comic strip] in B. Adelman Tijuana Bibles (1997) 105: What an agony pipe you’ve got!
1957		Metronome 74 17: This was not the clarinet of Brahms or Mozart. This was that same agony-pipe, which [...] wails its way into the most exciting of all symphonic expressions of the jazz idiom.

a vermilion costume.

1909

(ref. to 1879–81) J. Ware Passing Eng. of the Victorian Era 3/2: Agony in Red (Soc.). Vermilion costume. When the esthetic craze was desperately ‘on’ (1879–81), terms used in music were applied to painting, as a ‘nocturne in silver-grey,’ a ‘symphony in amber,’ a ‘fugue in purple,’ an ‘andante in shaded violet’.

to show off; to dress up.

1900		I.H. Trabue Black Wench 110: I suppose you feel yourself quite a belle now, with Colonel Tryon and that Kentucky nephew of his to see after you. I suppose you put on agony enough for both of them, or do they put it on for you?
1909		Everybody’s Mag. 21 756: But you and me, Pa, ’ll never put on agony for nobody.
1911		Motor Boat 8 22/1: The car's all right for a flash to make your neighbors envious ; but we of the motorboat crowd flock by ourselves, in places off the beaten path, where it doesn't get you anything to try to put on agony.
1931		G. Knight Binny’s Women 13: ‘Jo likes to put on agony,’ Binn told his associates downtown proudly. ‘Say, I wish you'd see how she always has flowers in the middle of the table, and makes the niggers keep the silver shining’.

to complain, to moan; the implication is that the problems are not wholly genuine, thus to exaggerate.

1849		W.H. Jeremie Furlough Reminiscences 116: Mdlle. mars [...] suddenly gave a scream and rushed to the side of the stage. This I took to be a portion of ‘piling up the agony’.
c.1850		Peeping Tom (London) 48 192/2: [US speaker] ‘I do think he [i.e. an actor] piled the agony a little high in the last scene’.
1853		N.Y. Clipper 3 Dec. 3/3: To pay a dollar to listen to something you do not understand, is rather ‘piling on the agony’ .
1859		Sth Aus. Advertiser (Adelaide, SA) 3 Sept. 3/2: To this terrific ‘piling up of the agony,’ Mr. George Milner Stephen replies by saying ‘you’re another.’ The Herald assumes ‘the dignified,’ and lectures its contemporary upon the impropriety of ‘slang’.
1868		Sporting Gaz. (London) 22 Apr. 7/2: No doubt the second act [...] will excite more intense interest, and then, in the popular slang phraseology of the day, we shall have to ‘pile up the agony’ for the denouement in May.
1874		‘English Sl.’ in Eve. Telegram (N.Y.) 9 Dec. 1/5: Let us present a few specimens:– [...] ‘Don’t put on an agony.’.
1874		‘Old Calabar’ Won in a Canter I 11: ‘Stick it on, old fellow; pile on the agony’.
1882		Bristol Magpie 7 Sept. 16/1: [T]he ‘agony-piling’ the heroine endures [...] would make harder stuff than ‘gods’ weep, or — laugh.
1890		Sunderland Dly Echo 15 Sept. 2/6: I was grossly insulted [by] a most impudent and imprudent letter signed by ‘Joe Bowman’ [...] who, after ‘piling on the agony’, concludes [etc].
1909		Eve. Star (Wash., DC) 19 Sept. 7/3: Then, seein’ how easy I was gettin’ out of it, I has to pile on the agony a little.
1935		S. Lewis It Can’t Happen Here (2005) 120: How those nuts had put on the agony about ‘Corpo art,’ and ‘drama freed from Jewish suggestiveness’.
1937		Sydney Morn. Herald 15 Mar. 4/2: ‘O-o-oh! You horrid boy! Don’t pile on the agony’.
1946		J. Hersey Hiroshima vii: It is written soberly, with no attept whatsoever to ‘pile on the agony’.
1969		(con. WWI) G. Coppard Machinegun to Cambrai 8: Could they put on the agony better than I could, or was it that I was just bubbling over with good health?