flattie

a chicken flattie

All the rube had to do was throw a baseball into a barrel and get a prize. How hard could that be? But the barrel was rigged with a false bottom as resilient as a trampoline so that a ball thrown from the specified distance invariably bounced out. Not everything was a flattie.

Flatties were in use on Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds of North Carolina, employed for shoal water fishing and trapping and usually manned by black boatmen ... no duck-hunting or use of guns was allowed by the local white men.

“SOMEDAY,” Hitchcock told me, “there will be three-dimensional wall Video screens, and Dial M for Murder will come into its own. But at the time I was making that picture, I worried that 3-D might be a fad that would fade and that Dial M would go out as a 'flattie.' […]

A carnival hawker may run a legitimate game in which you have a fair chance to win, but then again he may be a flattie — a carnival grifter expert at separating the unwary from their money.