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boondoggle
Jul. 27th, 2021 07:33 amboondoggle (BOON-dog-uhl, BOON-daw-guhl) - n., a braided leather cord worn by Boy Scout as a decoration; a cord of braided leather, fabric, or plastic strips made by a child as a project to keep busy; a wasteful and worthless project undertaken for political, corporate, or personal gain, typically a government project funded by taxpayers.
To give them in the order of evolution -- the last is the main sense today. The decoration -- which could be a neckerchief slide ("woggle"), hatband, or general braiding -- first appeared with that name in 1927 in the newspaper of a troop in Rochester, New York, with coinage attributed to scoutmaster Robert H. Link. The word entered wider use when one was presented to the Prince of Wales at the 1929 World Jamboree. The transference to wasteful government program was made via a 1935 article in the New York Times that claimed that there were wasteful New Deal programs that had people making boondoggles and other crafts. This boondoggle is a neckerchief slide:
Thanks, WikiMedia!
---L.
To give them in the order of evolution -- the last is the main sense today. The decoration -- which could be a neckerchief slide ("woggle"), hatband, or general braiding -- first appeared with that name in 1927 in the newspaper of a troop in Rochester, New York, with coinage attributed to scoutmaster Robert H. Link. The word entered wider use when one was presented to the Prince of Wales at the 1929 World Jamboree. The transference to wasteful government program was made via a 1935 article in the New York Times that claimed that there were wasteful New Deal programs that had people making boondoggles and other crafts. This boondoggle is a neckerchief slide:
Thanks, WikiMedia!
---L.
