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...
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...