Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a consciously nonsensical term for any unspecified object or other phenomenon for which one has no specific name.

1938		Amer. Biology Teacher 24 341/2: Are you satisfied that your multiplicative inverse rests securely on its Cartesian coordinates with its cosecant separated from the frammis by the rigid transformation of its orthogonal projection?
1938		Year Book Class of 1938: Dedham High School 33/1: Right now all his spare time is spent at Moseleys, roller skating for hours on end. ‘Foozle the frammis snaffle,’ says Bob, ‘or don't you like it?’.
1947		Collier’s 1 Jan. 56/4: ‘Listen, I caulderoled the nurse for a minute and sneaked down the frammis.’ ‘What?’ ‘I had to talk to you’.
1957		Newsweek 8 July 85: Cocktail-party sports use a ‘framis’ or broomstick to retrieve the Frisbee from under chairs [HDAS].
1967		Claremont Grad. School Yearbook 9: I said, ‘Go get Daddy the frammis.’ Now my number one boy is a very literal-minded lad and would have said, ‘What’s a frammis?’.
1972		R. Barrett Lovomaniacs 190: Anyway, there was this frammis with Sam.
1985		J.D. Bates Writing with Precision 21: Still, wouldn’t it be clearer to write: (a) Unscrew the frammis from the dohickey.
2005		J. Marasco Software Development Edge 70: Explaining to him that the project is being held up by a coding bug is like telling him that his car has to go into the shop because its frammis is broken.

2. (also frammiss) any form of confidence trick.

1953		J. Thompson Savage Night (1991) 109: I might have seen through that Fruit Jar frammis.
1965		J. Thompson Texas by the Tail (1994) 9: That was the way with any big-time frammis.
1971		T. Thackrey Thief 319: That’s how the real frammiss started.
1995		R. Polito Savage Art 461: She has been running the same frammis Thompson called ‘the oranges’ in The Grifters.