Duke's mixture - anyone use this phrase?

Posted by ESC on November 20, 2003

I was trying to describe a magazine (mental_floss) to my husband. I said: "It's partly trivia. Partly Harvard-education-in-five-minutes. It's a duke's mixture."

He had never heard the expression. That sent me to the Dictionary of American Regional English. It said that the origin of the phrase was a brand of pipe tobacco, Duke's Mixture. It came to mean a mixture of things. Also, chaos, state of confusion.

Have any of you heard of this expression? Or is this another mountainism?

• Duke's mixture - anyone use this phrase? Bruce Kahl 21/November/03