Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(US) a genteel womanizer.

1904		Eve. World (NY) 19 Mar. 4/1: Jimmy is a parlor athlete and a fighter. When not in training [...] he becomes the parlor athlete again, wears his dress suit and silk hat to the opera, dances.
1926		Maines & Grant Wise-crack Dict. 12/2: Parlor athlete – A frequent caller at young ladies’ homes.
1935		(con. 1920s) J.T. Farrell Judgement Day in Studs Lonigan (1936) 599: It’s the game for tea-hounds and parlour athletes.

(US) a prostitute who works in a sophisticated, up-market brothel; thus parlor, such a brothel.

1869		G. Ellington Women of N.Y. 201: The earnings of the ‘parlor girls’ vary.
1879		Nat. Police Gaz. (NY) 11 Oct. 6/3: ‘She said there was an awful nice fellow [...] she wanted me to get well acquainted with before I went into the parlors for hood’.
1890		Jefferson Jimplecute (TX) 15 Jan. 4/3: Fewer dudes; more honest laboroers; fewer parlor girls; more wash-tub maids.
1899		Appeal (St Paul, MN) 16 Sept. 4/5: The gentleman [...] saw those parlor girls [...] in a dive wine room.
1912		Day Book (Chicago) 8 Apr. 17/2: He was leaning over Pearl Peach - oh, yes, he’d found out the parlor girl’s name.
1915		G. Bronson-Howard God’s Man 195: Another girl scarcely older, posing in imitation of a former ‘parlor girl,’ now a vaudeville star.
1933		(con. 1870s–1910s) H. Asbury Barbary Coast (2002) 243: The parlor-house girls were the aristocracy of San Francisco’s red-light district.
1993		M.B. ‘Chopper’ Read How to Shoot Friends 112: So there it is. My shy little schoolmate had become a parlor queen.
2001		(con. late 19C) C. Jeffords Shady Ladies of the Old West 🌐 The euphemisms for prostitution were many [...] ‘crib/parlor-house girls’, ‘Cyprians’, ‘nymphs of the pave’ [etc.].

(US) dice.

1944

P. Kendall Dict. Service Sl. n.p.: dice [...] parlor golf.

1. (US) a high-class brothel, situated in what appears to be a fashionably furnished middle-class house, and run by a complaisant ‘aunt’ whose bevy of attractive ‘nieces’ gather in the front parlour to meet, and make themselves available to visitors (cheaper brothels had little more than bedrooms in which one had sex).

1856		Life in Boston & N.Y. (Boston, MA) 22 Nov. n.p.: What kind of rookery does Miss Allen keep [...] Does a street house pay better than a parlor house.
1869		G. Ellington Women of N.Y. 200: These women of the ‘parlor-houses,’ [...] lead a very unhappy and miserable life.
1872		E. Crapsey Nether Side of N.Y. 143: For some years past a most deplorable change has been going on which has had the effect of greatly decreasing the number of parlor houses, while houses of assignation have multiplied in the same ratio.
1888		Tennessean (Nashville, TN) 7 Feb. 1/3: The gang have organized a systematic scheme to entrap young women [...] and send them to Hayward, Wis., [...] where they are [...] distributed to the so called parlor houses there.
1894		Eve. World (NY) 21 Aug. 1/8: She was chambermaid at Katie Schubert’s parlor house [...] she has been in disorderly houses all her life.
1908		Truth (Salt Lake City, UT) 17 Oct. 6/2: This dead man had been one of the steady rounders of the tenderloin. He had been a frequenter of this and other ‘parlor houses’.
1910		Committee of Fourteen Social Evil in N.Y. City 30: There is, however, very little encouragement in the decrease in the number of ‘parlor houses’ [...] Former inmates of these houses [...] carry on their business in [...] rear rooms of saloons, tenement houses, private furnished room houses and in so-called massage parlors.
1913		Logan Repub. (UT) 15 Apr. 3/1: Story of a Fallen Girl [...] He suggested I live in one of the parlor houses.
1926		J. Black You Can’t Win (2000) 34: ‘Them women’ were women who kept ‘parlor houses’ in the Tenderloin district.
1938		R. Chandler ‘The King in Yellow’ in Spanish Blood (1946) 57: I’m canned, for not letting a drunken heel make a parlor-house and a shooting-gallery out of the eighth floor.
1940		(ref. to 1860s) H. Asbury Gangs of Chicago (2002) 97: Lou Harper’s elegantly furnished establishment [...] was the city’s first parlor-house, a type of bagnio which charged high prices and provided any sort of erotic amusement a customer might desire.
1957		J. Thompson ‘The Frightening Frammis’ in Fireworks (1988) 103: Twenty thousand dollars, the proceeds from [...] swindling the madam of a parlor house.
1960		in E. Cray Erotic Muse (1992) 188: I went huntin’ tail from a parlor house whore, / But I didn’t have enough, so they kicked me out of the door.
1986–7		Maledicta IX 148: The compilers ought to have looked farther afield and found: [...] juke house, parlor house, peg house.
2001		(con. late 19C) C. Jeffords Shady Ladies of the Old West 🌐 The vast majority of prostitutes worked out of bordellos, the polite term for which was ‘parlor houses.’.

2. attrib. use of sense 1.

1921

in E. Cray Erotic Muse (1992) 144: Gave all her money to Johnny / Who spent it on parlor-house whores.

(US) one who prefers not to take his girlfriend out but to stay at her home.

1929		News-Chron. (Shippenberg, PA) 29 Oct. 4/3: Jack, the parlor leech crashed a party at Mary’s house. She’s some inkwell but before she got through with that airdale he sure was blotto .
1930		Oakland Trib. (CA) 3 Mar. 6/4: In came an airedale who was a cross between a chisseler [sic] and a parlor leech.

1. (orig. and mainly US) a socialist whose activism is limited by the confines of their dinner table and does not extend on to the streets, let alone the barricades.

1919		Indianapolis Star (IN) 7 Oct. 6/4: A French pastry shop where a group of parlor pinks were bemoaning the fate of the world.
1920		N.Y. Times 25 Apr. XX1: As the complexion of the radical changes from palest parlor pink to darkest red, the joy increases in proportion.
[1920		S. Lewis Main Street (1921) 285: His manner was sneering at what he called ‘parlor socialists’].
1931		Exeter & Plymouth Gaz. 23 Feb. 4/5: Alas! theirs is that pale pink parlour brand of Socialism.
1932		L. Adamic Laughing in the Jungle 257: A wealthy woman radical in Pasadena, a ‘parlor pink’.
1941		B. Schulberg What Makes Sammy Run? (1992) 138: Maybe not Reds [...] But they’re goddam parlor-pinks and that’s just as bad.
1942		Tamworth Herald 24 Oct. 5/3: [William] Morris was no mere idealist or parlour-pink.
[1952		E. Brown Trespass 97: Morris’ southpaw buddies. The parlor revolutionaries].
1953		H. Tracy Mind You, I’ve Said Nothing (1961) 61: An altercation followed, with the I.R.A. man abusing the female Mass Observer for just these wrongs which, from the height of her parlour pinkery, she was so freely deploring.
1966		C. Stead Cotters’ England (1980) 235: Are your silk-stocking parlor pinks behind their Hampstead cottonwool barricades.

2. attrib. use of sense 1.

1923		Wash. Post 13 Apr. 1: It would be easily possible to ... link the American fund for public service with perhaps fifty or more of the leading pacifist, pro-Bolshevist and parlor pink organizations.
1936		(con. 1920s) Dos Passos Big Money in USA (1966) 841: You’ve written a firstrate propaganda piece for the Nation or some other parlorpink sheet in New York.

1. (US, also parlor lizard, ...ornament) a poor or miserly man who would rather court a woman in her own house than take her out on the town [-lizard sfx].

1865		in B.L. Ridley Battles and Sketches of the Army of Tennessee (1906) 461: I [...] put on a biled shirt and a paper collar and rode down division line. They began on me, ‘Ahem! Umph! Umph! Biled shirt! Ladies’ man! Parlor ornament! Take him to his ma!’.
1912		G. Ade Knocking the Neighbors 172: Once there was a Porch Rat, who was also a Parlor Snake and a Hammock Hellion. He worked the popular Free Lunch Routes for thirty years.
1917		Wash. Times (DC) 2 Apr. 6/3: O pulse that beats! / O heart that aches! / When the Lounge Lizard meets / The Parlor Snake.
1920		S. Lewis Main Street (1921) 306: You’d expect her to learn by and by that I won’t be a parlor lizard.

2. (US, also parlor pink, ...python, ...rat) a womanizer .

1915		S. Ford Shorty McCabe on the Job 114: He’s ducked bein’ a parlor rat for life.
1918		‘Max Brand’ ‘Above the Law’ in Coll. Stories (1994) 20: As parlor snakes, they aren’t in your class.
1924		H.L. Wilson Professor How Could You! 206: I knew there was another man. So that’s the parlor snake that broke up my home!
1930		F.S Fitzgerald ‘Josephine: a Woman with a Past’ in Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald V (1963) 156: ‘Is that what the crowd does that keeps following you around tonight?’ [...] ‘A lot of parlour snakes,’ she said ungratefully.
1931		P. Stevenson Gospel According to St Luke’s 285: To think: old Tony [...] the finest person he knew! turned down by a goddam girl for the sake of a... a ... parlor python!
1939		Howsley Argot: Dict. of Und. Sl. 36: parlor pink [...] a ‘society male,’ ladies’ man.
1978		R. Stern Natural Shocks (2004) 19: Will had been called many a name by his mentor — ‘Cretin,’ ‘Hamburger Head,’ ‘Faker,’ ‘Parlor Snake,’ ‘Dummy’.

(US Und.) the safebreaker who lights the fuse on a charge of nitroglycerine.

1914

Wash. Post 11 Nov. Miscellany 3/6: The misguided artist who lights the fuse after setting the charge of soup is uniformly called the ‘parlor man.’.

(US Und.) to tip.

1949

Monteleone Criminal Sl. (rev. edn).

(US) comprehensively.

1911

‘Sing Sing No. 57,700’ My View on Books in N.Y. Times Mag. 30 Apr. 5/2: Pere Goriot [...] This one is about an old fog-eater who [...] was bled from the parlor to the garret by a couple of flashy dames that belonged to the family.