Scott in Billings, Montana, wonders about the word hornswoggle, meaning to swindle, bamboozle, deceive, or trick. This verb found its way into American English during the 1820’s, when there was a fad among newspaper editors and writers for inventing words as funny as they were pretentious-sounding. Among these were words like goshbustified, skedaddle, absquatulate, snollygoster, and discombobulate. A similar thing happened in the 16th century when learned people created what came to be known as inkhorn terms. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Hornswoggle, That Odd Word”
Hi there. You have A Way with Words.
My name is Scott and I’m from Billings, Montana.
Okay.
Hi, Scott. What’s up?
Well, I’ve always had a word in my repertoire that escapes me as to where I would have come up with it.
The word is hornswoggle.
Hornswoggle.
And how would you use it?
That darn low-down, dirty, no-good rat hornswoggled me out of my paycheck.
Ooh.
Yeah.
That sounds serious.
I take it as swindle or bamboozle, but that’s a word for a different day.
That’s right. Swindle or bamboozle, deceive, trick.
Sometimes it’s just plain a lie to you without any kind of money accidentally trading hands or anything like that.
You just want some background on Hornswoggle?
Yeah, I’m kind of curious where it comes from.
I’m assuming I came up with it via the old-time Foghorn Leghorn or Yosemite Sam cartoons.
I didn’t watch a lot of westerns as a youngster.
Yeah, that sounds just like them.
Yeah, it sure does.
It sounds exactly kind of like the thing that Foghorn Leghorn would say.
Hornswoggle, H-O-R-N-S-W-O-G-G-L-E, although sometimes spelled with an A, Hornswoggle, dates to around the 1820s.
It just kind of pops up.
And it was part of this trend of newspaper editors and writers for newspapers just inventing these ridiculous long words that were funny to say and funny to read
And maybe had outlandish pronunciations and outlandish definitions,
Including things like gosh-bustified and snawly-goster and absquatulate
And skedaddle and discombobulate.
And a couple of them, as you’ve heard, skedaddle and discombobulate
Kind of caught on and had a little future.
Nobody really says absquatulate unless they’re being ironic, I think.
Yeah, Mark Twain used that a lot.
But it’s a sort of faux Latin, too.
They sound Latinate and learned.
There was a trend in the Middle English era of using or inventing inkhorn terms, and these were terms coined with Latin roots that were meant to replace existing English words or existing French words, and some of those are still with us.
But this is kind of a second wave of that, of just coming up with these words for the pure pleasure of inventing words, really.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, there’s not much more to it.
There’s a famous quote, though, that I want to share with you from 1895, talking about
Snollygoster.
A snollygoster is a shrewd or unprincipled person.
And the quote defines the word like this.
I found it in the Columbus Dispatch, but it was widely circulated in newspapers at the
Time.
A snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform, or principles,
And who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical
Assomnancy.
So talknafical assumonency is how these words get coined.
So somebody having a laugh there.
But there’s a ton of these, and again, some of them last, like hornswoggle and skedaddle, but some of them didn’t.
Well, I definitely don’t use it very often, but when it comes up, I always do wonder, so I appreciate you putting that to rest for me.
Scott, we’re glad to help.
Thanks for calling. Call us again sometime, all right?
All right. Thank you.
Thank you. Take care now.
Bye-bye.
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