A friend of mine asked me for a "solid" last night, which I quickly brushed off as a rather small favor, easily done.

This slang sense of solid goes back at least to the '70s. However — perhaps this is just my own personal idiolect, but I'm somewhat surprised to find that almost no definition of solid mentions that it's necessarily a substantial favor.

You could say, "Would you do me a favor and pass the mustard," but you would never call that a solid. At least I wouldn't. It would cheapen the solid.

(Obligatory Simpsons linguistic tie-in: at the end of "Bonfire of the Manatees," Homer says he can take a few days off work because "I've got a friend who owes me a solid." The next scene — wherein a manatee poses as Homer — is priceless.)

Labels: dialect, semantics