hum-box
Obsolete British slang for a church pulpit, a place from which the preacher 'hums' or drones on to the congregation.
Definitions
Obsolete British slang for a church pulpit, a place from which the preacher 'hums' or drones on to the congregation. The name is gently satirical, reducing the sermon to a hum and the pulpit to a box. Found in older British slang dictionaries from the 18th and 19th centuries.
The satirist described the vicar climbing into his hum-box each Sunday to deliver his weekly recitation.
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(obsolete, slang) The pulpit of a church.
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British archaic slang for a very strong ale or beer brewed in October — the traditional season for brewing strong winter ales when cooler temperatures aided fermentation. 'Humming' was slang for anything strong or intoxicating. The term is largely extinct except in historical and literary contexts.
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Victorian-era British slang for a coffin, playing on the grim logic that a coffin is, in the most literal sense, a box for cold meat. The phrase belongs to the dark, unsentimental vocabulary of 19th century street and working-class slang, where death was a frequent enough presence that blunt humor was a coping mechanism. 'Cold-meat box' has the same deadpan morbidity as other period euphemisms for coffins, and it shows up in penny dreadfuls and historical crime writing.
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(dated, slang) humbug; nonsense.