Showing posts with label Snollygoster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Snollygoster. Show all posts

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Published 8:29 PM by with 2 comments

Snollygoster

The Philippine presidential election is still months away but snollygosters are already working double time to make people vote for them.

And you say, "what is the meaning of Snollygoster?"

Snollygoster is defined as "a politician who is not genuienly interested in the welfare of his constituents but is instead driven only by his desire for personal gain of more wealth. You know who the snollygosters are, those politicians who are now spending millions every day for their TV ads.

Another definition of Snollygoster is this: a monster that eats children. It is the same meaning. Politicians are monsters who eat helpless people.

More about snollygoster here.
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Thursday, April 30, 2009

Published 1:42 AM by with 0 comment

Snollygoster

What is Snollygoster? It's a hot term now. it is defined as politician who is not interested in helping his voters but is instead driven by personal gain of wealth. Let me also highlight a definition from worldwidewords.org: A shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician.

This is another of that set of extroverted and fanciful words that originated in the fast-expanding United States of the nineteenth century (I see a snollygoster as a outsized individual with a carpetbag, flowered waistcoat, expansive demeanour and a large cigar). These days it’s hardly heard. Its last burst of public notice came when President Truman used it in 1952, and defined it, either in ignorance or impishness, as “a man born out of wedlock”. Many people put him right, some quoting this definition from the Columbus Dispatch of October 1895, with its splendid last phrase in the spirit of the original: “A Georgia editor kindly explains that ‘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 assumnacy’.” But an American dictionary fifty years earlier had defined it simply as a shyster. The origin is unknown, though the Oxford English Dictionary suggests it may be linked to snallygoster, which some suppose to derive from the German schnelle Geister, literally a fast-moving ghost, and which was a mythical monster of vast size — half reptile, half bird — supposedly found in Maryland, and which was invented to terrify ex-slaves out of voting.
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