On 2024-03-20 03:29:43 +0000, super70s said:
On 2024-03-20 02:43:12 +0000, moviePig said:
On 3/19/2024 9:09 PM, super70s wrote:
Yes there is such a word. I just heard a Brit reporter say it while
talking about the Princess Kate scandal.
I've seen it in some Brit novels, and I haven't read all that many.
Must get pretty good usage in Merrie Olde then, just caught my
attention and I thought it was worth looking up.
It is used in America too, but very rarely. This is a Time magazine
article from June 2015 ...
This Is What 'Jiggery-Pokery' Means
-----------------------------------
In a blistering dissent, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia
wielded an insult on Thursday that has caught the Internet's
attention. Arguing against his colleagues' reasoning in their
decision to allow health care subsidies nationwide, Scalia
accused them of "interpretive jiggery-pokery."
If you're not familiar with the term, Jiggery-pokery dates
back to at least the late 1800s, a rhythmic English phrase
describing dishonest manipulation or nonsense, akin to
hocus pocus, humbug, bambosh, baloney, berley (among the
Australians), bunkum, hogwash (also known as eyewash),
flapdoodle, flim-flam, flumadiddle, rubbish, galbanum (coming
from a French word for empty representations), hooey, hot air,
motormouthing, poppycock or malarkey, as Joe Biden is wont to
say.
Editors at the Oxford English Dictionary traced this
particular phrase back to the Scottish word jouk, which means
to skillfully twist one's body to avoid a blow-to manipulate
oneself like an acrobat. Scalia, in this case, insinuates that
his colleagues bend themselves and dissemble in order to work
around the truth by misinterpreting words of the law.
Among the Scots, the word jouk led to the notion of joukery or
jookery to describe underhanded dealing or trickery. Pawky is
another Scottish word, meaning artfully shrewd. A pawk, on its
own, is a trick. And by 1686, some inventive Scottish speakers
had combined the words in the phrase joukery-pawkery, which
they used to refer to clever trickery or slight of hand.
One might declare, as Sir Walter Scott did in his 19th century
tale The Black Dwarf, that "There has been some
jookery-paukery of Satan's in a' this!" From there, it was not
a long linguistic path to becoming the jiggery-pokery that
sent America running to their dictionaries this week.
Katherine Martin, the head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford,
recalls that Scalia pulled a similar trick in 2013, when he
used the "colorful reduplicative colloquialism" argle-bargle.
Both she notes, are uncommon in American English, while
jiggery-pokery is more commonly used among the Brits than
argle-bargle, which describes a disputable bandying of words,
a bit like bafflegab.
Just as when Sen. Ted Cruz used the word "squish" to insult
his rivals, Scalia's dissent is a reminder that a life in
government needn't be lived while only using serious sounding
words. Politicians can, after all, be fairly called
snollygosters and quockerwodgers who flip-flop and kick tires-or,
as Scalia might say, flapdoodlers who deceive themselves and
others with their jibber-jabber.
<
https://time.com/3936188/scalia-jiggery-pokery>
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