Inspired by Murray Suid's brilliant and humorous
Words of a Feather, I went in search of the origin of
flimflam and stumbled upon something more along the lines of a creation myth:
A flimflam flopped from a fillamaloo.
—Eugene Field, "The Fate of the Flimflam," Poems of Childhood (1894)
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Murray responds:
Now I've spent a good chunk of my morning looking for a picture of a "fillamaloo" or even a simple definition. Nothing comes up on the Internet. What am I supposed to do--imagine it!
Robert D Strock writes:
As a youngster, (I am now 85 years old), an old-timer described a "fillamaloo bird" as a native of Panama. Its right leg was longer than its left, so it was a hill dweller that always walked clockwise around the hills. It could fly upside down and backwards, and did so in ever decreasing circles until it flew up its rear end. It then would scream "fillamaloo", which translates as, "Gee, it's dark in here." He didn't have a picture of the creature.
