Post by PTBartman on Feb 24, 2007 14:57:11 GMT -5
rko said:
what the hell is a hornswoggle, something sylvan and patterson use in the bedroomAccording to here, www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20000412
April 12, 2000
hornswoggle
Charlie Jones wrote:
The other day the word hornswaggle came up. What a great word to roll off the tongue. It sounds like it comes from the old west, but what is its origin?
That is the million-dollar question. No one is exactly sure who first let this tasty morsel roll off his or her tongue. Hornswoggle is pretty old, so that person is certainly dead by now, and we'll never know. What we do know is that the word is uniquely American and almost definitely from Kentucky.
The first meaning of hornswoggle, 'embarrass or perplex', pops up in the early 19th century. People are fond of citing 1815, but I don't know whether this is a guess, a nice round number, or an actual citation that I haven't been able to find. The first written citation, though, is from Mathews' 1829 Beginnings of American English: "Hornswoggle, to embarrass irretrievably."
The second meaning developed naturally as an extension of the first, about thirty years later, 'to cheat or trick, bamboozle', as in this excerpt from the Oregon Angus: "P.F. is going to hornswoggle the Douglas Democrats" (May 1860). This is the meaning that is more familiar today.
So, what kind of image is this supposed to evoke? You mentioned the old west, and I always have some kind of rodeo picture in my head when I hear it. Maybe it is the horn part that makes me think of steer wrestling, or maybe it sounds like hogtied to me. I mean, is it horn-swoggle? or horns-woggle? Neither one is substantiated by earlier spellings or variants: hornswaggle, onswaggle, harnswaggle, hornscriggle, hornsnoggle, hornswargle.
As Charles Earle Funk points out in Horsefeathers and Other Curious Words (1958), turn-of-the-century Kentucky is known for a culture of frontiersmen who were always trying to outdo each other with "highfalutin words." The incredible thing about hornswoggle is not that we don't know who said it, but that we know it as a word today at all.
Heather
