snollygoster and boodlers

[Doc Windshadow]

The quite below on some late 1800 mudslinging is from "Slinging Mud: Rude Nicknames, Scurrilous Slogans, and Insulting Slang from Two Centuries of American Politics"

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Slinging-Mud/Rosemarie-Ostler/e/9781101544136?&cm_mmc=AFFILIATES-_-Linkshare-_-FYUtulI7nw4-_-10:1

Words for scoundrels were plentiful during the Gilded Age. Beginning in the 1880s, boodlers were politicians who lined their pockets with profits from bribery, graft, and fraud. Cash that party bosses doled out to reward faithful supporters was also known as boodle.

 

Boodle is an old word, adopted from New York's early Dutch settlers. Originally it meant someone's estate or possessions. It later evolved into underworld jargon for counterfeit money and finally into slang for ill-gotten gains in general. Such terms as boodler, boodleizing, boodle politician, and the verb to boodle were common in nineteenth-century newspaper editorials. For instance, an 1887 Nation editorial declares with exasperation, "New York is better known all over the ... world for boodle Aldermen and municipal rings than for anything else."

 

By the early twentieth century the word had lost its political meaning. Boodle is now close to being obsolete, but is still used occasionally to mean any kind of contraband.

 

Even less familiar than boodler these days is the fantastical coinage snollygoster. This word was popularized almost single-handedly by a Georgia Democrat named H. J. W. Ham, who traveled around the country during the 1890s with a stump speech titled "The Snollygoster in Politics." Ham claimed to have first heard the word during an 1848 political debate. He defined a snollygoster as a "place-hunting demagogue" or a "political hypocrite." The Columbus Dispatch for October 28, 1895, captures the spirit of the word with this more elaborate definition: "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 assumnancy."

 

It's unclear how snollygoster originated. The word may be derived from the German schnelle geister, meaning "quick spirit," but extravagant nonsense words such as lollapalooza and splendiferous were popular during the nineteenth century. Snollygoster may simply be part of this trend.

[Hacker, SASS #55963]

Oh, you mean Dumbocraps and Republicants?

[Rev Willy Dunkum, SASS # 61027]

I am so glad we have outgrown the need for political mud slinging in this day and age....

[Forty Rod SASS 3935]

Yeah, me too.

 

I can think of lots of things that I'd like to sling, but mud ain't one of them.