rubbyn.
/ˈrʌbi/, U.S. /ˈrəbi/, Canadian English /ˈrʌbi/ Canadian.
1. An alcoholic who drinks an improvised intoxicant, as rubbing alcohol, aftershave, etc.; a drunken vagrant or down-and-out.
ΘΚΠ
the world > food and drink > drink > thirst > excess in drinking > [noun] > one who drinks to excess > alcoholic or habitual drinker > one addicted to specific drink
wino1915
smoke-hound1932
metho1933
pink-eye1945
rubby-dub1945
rubby1950
plonko1963
meths-drinker1968
1950 A. Palmer Montreal Confidential 102 The police department has probably given up keeping score of rubbies they have fished out of the river.
1965 Vancouver Sun 18 Oct. 35/6 Most of the dinner guests were men off the street, rubbies, derelicts, the jobless, alcoholics, the lost ones, residents of Vancouver's Skid road.
1979 Winnipeg Free Press 7 Sept. (Final ed.) 1/5 West regularly went out drinking Saturday night and was ‘very thick with a rubbie named George’.
2000 J. M. Gray Gift for Little Master 175 Now she picks up her coffee with chewed-up fingers and drinks in slow gulps, holding the cup in both palms like a rubby on the soup line.
2. Rubbing alcohol, sometimes mixed with wine, etc., used as an intoxicant.
ΘΚΠ
the world > food and drink > drink > intoxicating liquor > distilled drink > other distilled liquor > [noun] > alcohol as drink
white line1895
rubby-dub1940
rubby1961
1961 Maclean's 29 July 36/1 A gallon of wine and two bottles of rubby and you can throw a party in the jungles that'll last all night.
1974 D. Richards Coming of Winter i. 29 And there in the shacks the old men hard on rubby, telling stories of the war.
1998 R. Wiebe & Y. Johnson Stolen Life (1999) xiii. 370 She was always called ‘Bubbles’ because the rubby she drank—they called it ‘taster's choice’!—made her foam.
This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, March 2011; most recently modified version published online March 2022).
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n.1950