Shyster

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈʃaɪs.tə(ɹ)/

Definitions

1. A deceptive individual who manipulates situations to exploit others, particularly through dishonest practices in legal or business arenas
2. An unscrupulous person who engages in deceit or fraud, often taking advantage of others for personal or financial gain
3. A fraudulent individual who uses trickery and unethical tactics to exploit others, especially in legal or financial dealings

Etymology: In 1843 a New York newspaper began aiming a borrowed insult at the city's crooked lawyers. Its hidden core was probably a German obscenity: the word that literally means "shitter." The paper was The Subterranean, a scrappy radical weekly run by Mike Walsh, an Irish-born brawler of a journalist who made a career of attacking legal and political corruption in New York. His columns carry the earliest well-attested appearances of "shyster," and Walsh used it relentlessly against the pettifogging attorneys who preyed on the city's poor. He did not invent it. Research by the linguist Gerald Cohen showed that Walsh picked the word up from a lawyer named Cornelius Terhune, so it was apparently circulating in the courthouse world before it reached print. Walsh's campaign gave it a public life, and by the end of the 19th century it had spread across American English. Where Terhune got it is the real puzzle. The most persuasive answer points to German "Scheißer," a coarse term for a worthless, contemptible fellow, built on the verb "scheißen," "to defecate." New York in the 1840s was full of German speakers. English already had a related form, "shicer," for a worthless person, and the German word may have come in through it. The ending was then probably reshaped on the pattern of English words like "huckster," "trickster" and "youngster," which name a person by what he does. Underneath, the German verb belongs to the same old Germanic family as English "shit" and "shite," a family that traces back to an ancient root meaning "to split" or "to separate." Not everyone is convinced. The Oxford English Dictionary still calls the word "of obscure origin." It allows that it may come instead from an old sense of "shy" meaning "disreputable," with the same "-ster" ending added. The German derivation has the better support, but the case is not formally closed. Two popular stories can be set aside. One claims there was once a New York lawyer named Scheuster, so notorious for shabby practice that his name became a byword. The documentary evidence uncovered since points to Walsh and Terhune, and no such eponymous villain is needed. The other links the word to Shylock, Shakespeare's moneylender in "The Merchant of Venice." The two words sound alike and both suggest a predatory dealer, which makes the connection tempting. But it is conjecture, and the words are not related. The real ancestor is less literary and considerably ruder.

Synonyms: fraud, charlatan, crook

Antonyms: honest person, virtuous person