A gravedigger, a squid-jigger, and Mick Jagger were smuggling boomerangs and goggles in a dune buggy, juggling the boombox and jiggling and wiggling and snuggling as it squiggled on the dunes. Hah! What a boondoggle!
Wait, what was a boondoggle?
The little braided ring holding Mick’s scarf on, of course.
Those who know the word boondoggle almost certainly know it as a word for a wasteful project, a government make-work or junket – a way to hornswoggle the taxpayer. This got its start with an article on the front page of the New York Times on April 4, 1935, with the headlines “$3,187,000 RELIEF IS SPENT TO TEACH JOBLESS TO PLAY; $19,658,512 VOTED FOR APRIL | ‘BOON DOGGLES’ MADE | Aldermen Find These Are Gadgets—Hear of Eurythmic Dances.” The article explains:
The Board of Estimate voted an April relief appropriation of $19,658,512 yesterday, following disclosures by the Aldermanic committee investigating relief that $3,187,000 a year was being spent on providing dancing lessons and other recreation for the unemployed.
In the course of the day the Aldermen learned that the making of “boon doggles” was being taught to relief recipients. “Boon doggles” is a colloquial term meaning gadgets. Eurythmic dancing was covered in another work project, and there was a staff at work teaching the unemployed hobbies, the testimony disclosed. . . . Lloyd Paul Stryker, counsel for the committee, characterized the research projects in one word—“bunk.”
Stryker, as it happens, was a well-known lawyer, and one who cut quite a figure. He seems to have been especially important in the spread of boondoggle for the “wasteful project” use. (Eurythmic dancing, by the way, is a kind of expressive movement invented by Rudolf Steiner in 1911; the 1980s musical duo named themselves after it.) Further down in the article, we read a bit more information on the subject given by the mayor of New York City at the time:
Commenting yesterday on the Aldermanic investigation headed by Mr. Deutsch, Mayor La Guardia said:
“Educated persons and college graduates must eat, and when these projects were established by the Federal Government, there was a real crisis, particularly among the college groups and so-called white collar classes. Many things were done to give these people work, and it is quite possible that people do not understand some of these projects set up to give college people relief.
“If any one responsible will say that college people and white collar workers should not be continued on relief, I will be ready to take that recommendation, if they will take the responsibility.
“If the law was changed to permit us to use white collar workers on necessary city work, we would be glad to use them. But the law prevents this. I see nothing to ridicule in giving relief to people who need it. College graduates are going to get the same consideration as others in need of employment.”
Well. It’s always the way: what government does to benefit one set of citizens will (rightly or wrongly) appear wasteful to at least some of those whom it does not directly benefit. I won’t go into the further details of the social circumstances and obvious class distinctions evinced in the article, but I do need to correct one misapprehension: “boon doggles” (boondoggles, as we spell them most typically) are not gadgets. They are braided lanyards and similar items braided of leather or fabric. As the New York Herald Tribune noted about a visit of the Prince of Wales in 1929 (six years earlier),
The Prince also wore around his scout hat a “boondoggle,” which is a bright leather braided lanyard worn much in the manner of the hat cord used by the United States Army.
Thanks to Michael Quinion, I learn of a mention in the British magazine Punch a week and a half later, where it says that boondoggle is
a word to conjure with, to roll around the tongue; an expressive word to set the fancy moving in strange and comforting channels; and it rhymes with “goggle,” “boggle,” and “woggle,” three of the most lighthearted words in the English language.
The word was originally coined out of thin air – but obviously on the basis of what sounded good to an English speaker – by one Robert H. Link. He at first used it to refer to something else (I don’t know what) but, as he was an Eagle Scout, he put it to use to refer to the braided lanyards and braided leather neckerchief slides and similar things that the scouts had. It was a word he made up for fun, and it has been a boon to many – the mind boggles.
Whereas what we more commonly call boondoggles now aren’t necessarily made up for fun – more often for profit. And they are less boon and more dog. They are most often wastefully expensive projects that add little to no value or are inferior to alternatives. It could be destroying a public good such as a park to put in a large, outrageously overpriced, comically badly designed, and quite inappropriately sited private enterprise that has no hope of succeeding, just because of some side benefit for the politicians pushing it through. It could be building a badly designed airport that takes far too long to put in and doesn’t function well – there are a few that are seen that way, although, I note, not the one named after Mayor La Guardia. It could be some other construction project or similar make-work that drains money needlessly into the pockets of a select few.
All of these cases have two things in common, though: unlike the case cited in the 1935 New York Times, the people they benefit the most are people who already have plenty of money and means; and the people involved are no boy scouts.
Sesquiotica 