Bamboozle

Part of speech: verb

Pronunciation: /bæmˈbuː.zl̩/

Definitions

1. To deceive or confuse someone by means of a trick or deceptive scheme
2. To trick or mislead someone through cunning deception or confusing tactics
3. To confuse and deceive another person by employing dishonest or elaborate schemes

Etymology: In 1710 Jonathan Swift, writing in the Tatler, drew up a list of upstart words he thought were debasing English. They had been invented, he complained, by fashionable young men about town, and he named "banter" and "bamboozle" among them. Swift wanted them gone. Both are still here, and the second has kept its secret: no one knows where it came from. It had surfaced only a few years earlier. The first recorded use dates to 1703, with the sense it still carries: to cheat, trick, swindle. It began as cant, the slang of tricksters and the streets, and throughout the eighteenth century dictionary-makers treated it as very low talk. It grew out of an older piece of the same vocabulary. In the seventeenth century a "bam" was a fraud or a cheat, and to "bam" someone was to con them. The longer verb seems to be that short one stretched out. Some have suggested a French source, "embobiner," to hoodwink. Beyond that, the trail goes cold, and the guesses have been many. One links the word to the Scots "bumbaze," to confound or perplex. Another points to French "embabouiner," to make a fool of someone, which is built on the word for a baboon. In the nineteenth century the etymologist Hensleigh Wedgwood proposed Italian "bambolo" and "bamboccio," a baby or small child, stretched to mean a gullible simpleton. Others reached for "bombast." None of these has won the argument. A big part of the difficulty is that "bam," "bum" and "bom" are noise-syllables that turn up again and again in expressive words, so resemblances are cheap and proof is nearly impossible. Even the shrewdest modern accounts call the whole question guesswork from beginning to end. Where scholarship ran out, storytellers stepped in. One tale credits the word to a nobleman at the court of Charles II, a claim with no evidence behind it. A theory that it came from Romany has nothing to support it either. Best of all is a yarn reported, with raised eyebrows, in Victorian slang dictionaries: that it was a "Chinese and gypsy word" for strapping bamboo canes to a person to teach him to swim. It is pure invention. The explanation is itself a bamboozlement, a story that fools whoever is ready to believe it. An antidote, "de-bamboozle," meaning to set a deceived person straight, is recorded from 1919. No one has yet managed to do that for the word itself.

Synonyms: fool, trick, dupe

Antonyms: enlighten, clarify