Margaret from Dallas, Texas, asks about her family’s word cornswaggled, pronounced like cornswoggled, for feeling confused. It’s a rarer variant of hornswoggled or hornswaggled, a word that originally meant to cheat or deceive someone, or to get them thoroughly mixed up. The word belongs with a mid-19th-century American taste for playful, pseudo-Latinate inventions such as confusticate, to confuse or confound, goshbustified, mightily pleased, and absquatulate, to leave in a hurry. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Hornswoggled” and “Cornswoggled” Mean Confused, but Where Do They Come From?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Jill. How are you?
Excellent. Jill, where are you calling from?
Dallas, Texas.
Well, welcome. What can we do for you?
Thank you. My daughter is with me, actually, and she has a word that her grandfather used, and thus I used, and I don’t know where it came from, nor does she.
Well, yes, please. Let’s talk to her.
Yes, I am going to put her on the phone right now. Her name is Margaret.
Okay.
Hi, Grand Martha.
Hi, Margaret.
How are you doing?
Good, good.
I’m very excited to be on here and asking my question.
So it’s a word that my grandfather used and my mom used, so I’ve always wondered the meaning behind it.
It is corn swoggled.
They usually use it when they’re confused, so that’s what we just associate it with.
But I’m curious if it actually means that and where it came from.
Can you spell that, Margaret?
Yes.
C-O-R-N-S-W-A-G-G-L-E-D.
Interesting.
Are you saying corn swaggle or corn swoggled?
We say it like corn swoggled.
Corn swoggled.
Okay.
This is a wonderful word, Margaret.
I’m so glad you asked about it because we rarely see this version of it.
It’s usually horn swoggle.
Have you heard that word?
I have not.
Okay.
So that’s an H instead of a C at the beginning.
Yeah.
Wow, I’ve never heard that.
Yeah, well, the word hornswoggle means to cause difficulty for somebody.
It originally meant to cheat or deceive somebody or just get them all messed up.
I’m hornswoggled because I can’t do this or that thing.
And these words come from a period in the mid-19th century when there was this great fad for kind of mixing and matching syllables to form these words that sounded like they came from Latin, but they didn’t really.
So you got all these words during this period, like confusticate, which means to confuse, or gosh, bustified, which means you’re really, really pleased, or absquatulate, which means to leave in a hurry.
And hornswoggle was one of those words, and the far less common version of that is cornswoggled.
And I’m so excited to hear an actual usage of this because we don’t see it that often.
Wow.
Wow.
What do you make of that, Margaret?
TMI, Martha.
That’s just crazy.
I never knew that this was the less used version of it.
Yeah.
It’s got a long history.
Yeah, but it’s a really fun word to say, right?
Yeah, definitely.
Yes.
Well, anytime you’re corn swoggled about language, give us a call.
Okay, Margaret?
Okay.
Thank you so much.
Bye-bye.
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