Dated American slang meaning to dump, jilt, or coldly dismiss a romantic partner. To give someone the air is to metaphorically blow them off — leaving them standing alone in nothing but fresh air where your presence used to be. Popular in early-to-mid twentieth-century American speech, the phrase appears in crime fiction and jazz-era dialogue. Nowadays it reads as charmingly old-fashioned, though the sentiment is as timeless as heartbreak itself.
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Regional slang from around the English-speaking world — British, Australian, Irish, Caribbean, Nigerian, Filipino, AAVE, and the hyphenated-English dialects that make the internet sound local.
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(slang, dated) To jilt or ditch a lover.
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