My wife and I enjoy doing crossword puzzles together. It is both very companionable and it gives the grey cells a good work-out. The best puzzles are found in the Guardian. We don’t have a regular subscription but buy the occasional copy as a treat. The edition my wife bought on Saturday certainly turned out to be a classic.
We were doing quite well when we came up against the following clue. “Golly! So stern after beating a politician like Trump.” My wife quickly latched on to the notion that an anagram of “golly so stern” had to be involved, but we couldn’t take it further. By yesterday we had quite a few of the letters in place from intersecting clues, and she got out the Scrabble tiles and began playing with possibilities. Obviously we were intended to come up with a word that could describe “a politician like Trump”, but blundered about for some time before she had a brain-wave. Logically the only word that satisfied the normal rules of English spelling was “snollygoster”, but neither of us had ever encountered such a word.
She decided just to put it into a search engine and see what turned up …. and to our amazement this is indeed a word to be found in dictionaries!* It means “A politician who cares more for personal gain than serving the people.” The dictionary noted that it dated from 1845, and referred to it as “US dialect”. No wonder we had never encountered it!
Despite its obscurity I am impressed by the potential utility of this word. It could well be applied, as the compiler of the crossword suggests, to Donald Trump, but believe me we have in the UK a number of home-grown snollygosters. I can see that in future I will be leading a one-man campaign to revive the word and adopt it.
*American ones: not English.