I've Been Hornswoggled!

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Lexicon Valley Introduction

0:30From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm Mike Volo with Bob Garfield. And today on the show, our first mailbag segment, listener Stephen wrote in from Australia to say, quote, I've been hornswoggled. So what exactly has happened to me? And when did people start getting hornswoggled? Is it painful? Thanks. Well, I'm sorry that happened to you, Stephen.

1:01I know it was touch and go for a while, but you seem to be okay now. Bob, have you ever been hornswoggled? And did you press charges? I have been hornswoggled, but I hornswoggled myself in a little bazaar in Jerusalem, paying 20 times more for a souvenir than it was worth because I did all the parking myself. I said, name me a price for this icon in a hammered silver frame. And I named a sum in excess of $100.

1:36I bought it. And at the next stall, I saw it was like $9.

1:42Did his eyes light up when you said that price? I'm sure he tells the story to this day.

Hornswoggle History

1:48Okay, so Stephen wants to know, when did people first start getting hornswoggled? In the late 1820s, the University of Virginia published a weekly journal called the Virginia Literary Museum. If you look at just one issue alone from December 30, 1829, it begins with a long discussion of various superstitions around the world, things lucky and unlucky, as they put it.

2:19That's followed by an essay about advances in steam-powered vehicles, which were reaching speeds of up to 30 miles an hour. Next is a possibly concerning article, though not surprising somehow, the first sentence of which is, quote, it is a difficult matter to arrive at any accurate knowledge of the number of Jews.

2:49Yeah, you didn't see that coming. No, I did not. Obviously, this was written, what do you say, 1830? 1829. Yeah, almost 30 years before the invention of the Jew-o-meter. So, right. Well, nevertheless, the piece then goes on for a couple of pages, endeavoring to arrive at the number of Jews everywhere in the world, estimating the number on every continent, the number in every country, the number in every state of Germany.

3:19This journal had a little of everything. It had folk mythology, popular science, Jew counting, 3,163,800, in case you're wondering. And it also had language. There's a section on the meaning of various Americanisms, and right after the word hoppergrass, which is apparently a southern term for, yeah, a grasshopper, we find the word hornswoggle.

3:50This is the earliest example of hornswoggle that we know of, and it's defined in the journal as, quote, to embarrass irretrievably. Hmm. Yeah, that's what I said. Now, embarrass is one of those words that could mean a few different things, right? The way we most commonly use it has to do with a combination of shame and self-consciousness. But it originally meant to obstruct or to burden. To be embarrassed by debt is a phrase you hear even today.

4:23Yes, to be impecunious, to be financially embarrassed. Right. And that doesn't mean to be shamed. It means to be financially impaired by having a lack of funds. In fact, Merriam-Webster has a usage note next to their entry for embarrass to address this exact confusion. It says that the hampering, restricting, impairing, or burdening senses of embarrass, quote, are still in use today, but they're less common than the to-make-some-one-feel-confused-and-foolish-in-front-of-other-people sense is.

5:00Hmm. I seem to remember that in Spanish, the confusion gets still greater because when Americans try to express, you know, humiliation or shame or whatever it is that embarrassment is, they translate it, embarassado, I am humiliated, which in Spanish means I'm pregnant. Pregnant, yes. We're talking about 200 years ago, so I'm not sure it's clear which sense is intended in that 1829 journal

5:31in their definition of Hornswoggle to embarrass irretrievably. But I looked at a number of uses of Hornswoggle throughout the 1800s. And my own sense is that it depends on the context. Most often, it seems to mean coercing or tricking someone into doing something, browbeating them in a way, right? So a clothing store in Missouri urges people in the 1890s to decide for themselves where to shop.

6:04Quote, don't let anyone influence you. Don't let them Hornswoggle you. Shop at Cummins and Hershberger. Well, I'll tell you something about that Hershberger. At the time of that ad, there were 3.2 million other people just like him around the world.

6:24Okay, so the word comes up a lot in political context. A newspaper in Wisconsin in the 1860s says that the Democrats were hunting for, quote, a Republican whom they can Hornswoggle to run for the assembly on the Democratic ticket, trying to get someone to switch sides. Again, this idea of kind of coercing someone into doing something that they might not otherwise do on their own. This, by the way, is in and of itself surprising to me, Mike, because I just thought it was a synonym for being duped.

7:01It never occurred to me that there was a coercion element to the word. But you'll agree that that is evident from those examples, right? Oh, absolutely. LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video,

7:31LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at linkedin.com slash smallbusiness. Okay, so a newspaper in Oregon in the 1880s had this note to its readers. If any subscriber fails to get his copy of the Gazette, let him send word to this office, and we will find out where it was hornswoggled. So that, to me, suggests that embarrassed sense of hindered or obstructed.

8:04Which suggests you can define this word without any presence of malice. Mm-hmm. Right, yeah. Unless the paper is suggesting that somebody swiped it along the way. The point is that however hornswoggled was used throughout the 1800s, by the mid-1900s, it seems to have settled on this meaning of what you were saying, being duped or cheated or swindled. So the famous screenwriter Ben Hecht, who wrote several Hitchcock movies, including Notorious,

8:38dozens of others, he published a memoir in the 1960s about his time as a crime reporter in Chicago. Which was the basis for? Another movie, yes. The Front Page, which is a masterpiece. Yeah, and he wrote in that memoir that some crook confessed to having hornswoggled a banker out of $200,000. So that is precisely the duped or cheated definition that you were suggesting.

9:08In 2015, Entrepreneur Magazine did a piece about Robert Herjavec, who's one of the investors on the show Shark Tank. I've never seen that, but apparently a formative moment in Herjavec's childhood was watching his mother get, quote, hornswoggled out of $500 by a slick traveling vacuum salesman. So that's typically how you see it used today. Somebody gets cheated out of money.

9:38They get duped into buying trinkets like you did at the bazaar in Israel. In case you're wondering, someone who hornswoggles is, in fact, a hornswoggler. And one of my favorite examples of this is from 1914, when a newspaper in Chicago wrote about the, quote, tax dodgers, tax fixers, and all the big and little tax hornswogglers. It's also used as an interjection.

10:10My favorite example of this is by another reporter from the early 1900s. This is a guy named Wilbur J. Chamberlain, traveled around the world working for the New York Sun, and he sent letters back home to his wife. Quote, In all my travels, I have never yet found a place where I didn't run across somebody I knew. Now, in this case, he happened to be in Hong Kong. It was 1901. He was covering the Boxer Rebellion.

10:41He said he hadn't been there for more than six hours when he hears a voice behind him say, So you see, the phrase, I'll be hornswoggled, is used here and in other examples as a euphemism, basically, for I'll be damned. Probably a contemporary equivalent wouldn't be, I'll be damned. It might be, fuck me.

11:12What are you doing here, Chamberlain? You son of a bitch. Which, that may have been what this guy said to him, but you probably didn't print that in letters back to your wife at the time. Yeah, probably not. I remember, Bob, the second time I ever heard the word hornswoggler. It was in, of all places, Blazing Saddles. I don't know if you remember this, the great Mel Brooks movie from the mid-1970s, co-written by Richard Pryor and others. The scene is, it's a small Old West town called Rock Ridge.

11:46Everybody's on edge. The sheriff's been murdered. The townsfolk are scared. This is a comedy, by the way. They're gathered in the church. There's talk of people leaving. And then the town drunk gets up and says... There's no way that nobody's gonna leave this town. Hell, I was born here, and I was raised here, and dadgummit, I'm gonna die here. And no sad reigning, bushwhacking, hornswogging, crocker-crocker is gonna revel my business cutter.

12:21Yeah, Blazing Saddles, by the way, hilarious, absolutely hilarious, from first frame to last. It's so gigantically, stratospherically, politically incorrect. It could never, ever, ever be filmed today. Mel Brooks or no Mel Brooks.

Hornswoggle in Pop Culture

12:43Yeah, that's for sure. But there were some laughs. It was, as you say, it was really funny, and that is the second time that I heard the word. Okay, I'll bite. Tell me, Mike, just wondering, what was the first time you heard the word? I have no idea. No, of course I do. The first time I heard the word happens to be in yet another movie in which Gene Wilder played a lead role,

13:14Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. This is when Mr. Wonka was explaining what life was like for the Oompa Loompas back in Loompa Land. Nothing but desolate wastes and fierce beasts. And the poor little Oompa Loompas were so small and helpless, they would get gobbled up right and left. A wang doodle would eat ten of them for breakfast and think nothing of it. So I said, come and live with me in peace and safety, away from all the wang doodles and horn swogglers and snozz wangers and rotten, vermicious knids.

13:49So the horn swogglers were one of several predators of the Oompa Loompas. I don't remember if that was actually from the original book by the great children's author and anti-Semite Raoul Dahl. But that, for me, will always be the first definition of the word. Well, it's interesting that you've had all these exposures and can itemize them. If you had asked me, and notably, you did not, I would have said, well, I know where horn swoggling comes from.

14:21Every third paragraph that Mark Twain ever wrote. I would think that Huckleberry Finn is thick with horn swoggle, among his other masterpieces. Maybe he never used the word at all, but it just seems very Mark Twain-ish. Well, the question is, did somebody make it up, right? Like gobbledygook, which we talked about on a previous show. Is it from some Greek root, meaning, you know, to hoodwink or to bamboozle? The truth is, the etymology is simply unknown.

14:54Nobody really knows where it came from, except perhaps the New York Times. I found in the New York Times magazine from April 15th, 1934, a tiny piece about horn swoggle. There's no byline, but it's possible that William Sapphire wrote it. He was only four years old at the time, but he was a smart kid. He was precocious. Yeah. Yeah. So this could have been his proto attempt at an on-language column.

15:25Here's what it says. Meaning to trick or swindle, its origin has been traced to cowboy lingo. In every herd of cattle are wily steers, which, as soon as they feel the rope settle on their horns, begin wriggling and dodging. By, quote, horn swoggling, they throw off the lasso before it slips down the horns and tightens around the neck. The cowboy, who lost a steer in this way, was said to have been horn swoggled.

15:58Well, that makes sense. It seems to fill the bill. What's surprising is that you only found one 1934 reference to it in an unsigned piece in the New York Times. You would have thought that it was otherwise very well documented and that there were literary citations, contemporaneous, to the steer roping life that would flesh this out still farther, but I guess not, huh? Let's just say that the etymology is too good not to be true, despite there being, as you're

16:33suggesting, no real evidence for it. More importantly, though, I would suggest that to be horn swoggled in that way is to be embarrassed in both senses of that word, right? Which brings us full circle to that first known example of horn swoggle in that Jew counting journal from Virginia. When it comes to definitions for the word horn swoggle, you have to shame, possibly, to obstruct, certainly, to swindle, to cheat.

17:06There's an expression I'm looking for here. It's an embarrassment of riches. Embarrassment of riches. On one hand, embarrassment of riches seems to suggest the opposite of financially embarrassed, which means you have no access to funds. Embarrassment of riches means you have a surfeit of funds. But then imagining further, you have so much, you don't even know what to do. You're like a Soviet refugee in an American supermarket for the first time, standing in the cereal

17:41aisle, and you cannot make a choice because there are too many. So it's an impediment in and of itself. Yes. Both of those expressions, an embarrassment of riches and financially embarrassed, are using the meaning of embarrassed as burdened or hindered. Well, fuck me. I'll be horn swoggled. Lexicon Valley is produced by Livia Bloom Ingram. Who is known by her enemies as a sidewinding, bushwhacking, horn swoggling cracker croaker.

18:14She's my friend, and that's what I think of her. Go to booksmartstudios.com to access our bonus episodes and to get all of our shows ad-free. All right, Mikey. We done here? We are done. Later, Gator. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion-dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story.

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