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Miriam
Hornswoggle
Yesterday I came across this funny word "to hornswoggle": "Don't let them hornswoggle you!" It means to cheat/trick/bamboozle/hoodwink someone: "Unknown, 1829 US, jocular coinage like contemporary absquatulate. Presumably horns + waggle with humorous faux ablaut or combination with wobble (compare later woggle, 1923), perhaps inspired by lassoed steers trying to escape by moving their head." (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hornswoggle). (Btw, absquatulate means to skedaddle. That should clear things up. ;) )

Funnily, when I asked my boys about "hornswoggle" they immediately told me that it's that "short Irish wrestler". "Hornswoggle" is the stage name of WWE wrestler Dylan Mark Postl (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornswoggle) who suffers from dwarfism and often impersonated a leprechaun on stage.

Comments · 2

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Definitely an amusing word. I’ve heard it, possibly even by my step grandfather from Alabama. It obviously has agrarian origins and sounds like something that only people from rural areas would say now. As such it gets lumped in the category of hick or redneck language, words used to denigrate rural people. The lower prestige and judgment of rural language being incorrect seems to be a pretty common thread around the world.
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Hornswoggle (the wrestler) would do what his name implies. He would cheat people and trick people. It was not by accident that name was chosen for that character.

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