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WORDS · LANGUAGE · ETYMOLOGY
WORD OF THE YEAR 2016: SNOLLYGOSTER 46%
(n.) an unprincipled politician
As 2016 drew to a close, Collins Dictionaries opted for Brexit as their Word of the Year, Oxford Dictionaries went with post-truth, and Merriam-Webster plumped for surreal. Here at Haggard Hawks, we handed the choice of our very first Word of the Year over to you, and from a shortlist of five typically obscure and seldom-used words that seemed to sum up previous twelve months, a clear winner eventually emerged: taking more than two-fifths of the votes, HH’s 2016 Word of the Year was snollygoster.
Snollygoster is a term lifted from nineteenth-century American slang. Its roots are presumably entwined with that of the snallygaster, a monstrous part-bird-part-reptile said to inhabit the hills around Maryland and Washington (which in turn takes its name from the German schnelle geister, meaning ‘quick spirits.’) Quite how that came to be applied to politics is unclear, but given one nineteenth-century newspaper editor’s definition that proved popular over on Twitter this year—“a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who ... gets there by sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy”—it seemed a word worth reviving after a year of political upheval.
THE SHORTLIST
cacafuego 27%
(n.) a blustering braggart
whipmegmorum 10%
(n.) a noisy quarrel about politics
toad-eater 9%
(n.) a sycophantic follower, especially one who knowingly tolerates another’s deception
epicedium 8%
(n.) a funeral ode or lament, a song of mourning
Given some of the characters who steered the global ship in 2016, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a word for a blustering braggart came in second behind in a word for an unscrupulous political chancer. Borrowed from Spanish, the word cacafuego first appeared in English in The Fair Maid of the Inn, a 1625 work by the playwright John Fletcher. But the word itself first came to prominence almost fifty years earlier as the nickname of a Spanish galleon, the Nuestra Señora, that was captured by Sir Francis Drake off the coast of South America in 1578. At a time of heightened tensions between England and Spain, Drake’s victory proved a huge boost to English morale—while the tale of an extraordinarily powerful ship being easily vanquished gave us a word for someone who acts more impressive or imposing then they truly are. Built around the same template as spitfire, incidentally, the word cacafuego literally means ‘fire-shitter.’