The word no one had dreamt of before
2017, when a Chief Minister of Bihar, elected alongside Congress and RJD on an anti-bjp platform, suddenly switched sides and joined the BJP. I promptly tweeted: “Word of the day! *snollygoster* Definition: US dialect: a shrewd, unprincipled politician ... First Known Use: 1846 ... Most recent use: 26/7/17”. Of course, I could have resurrected it again when another politician betrayed years of eloquent opposition to the BJP by joining that party – but it hardly seemed worth repeating, so convinced are Indians that shrewdness and lack of principle are indeed the defining characteristics of Indian politicians.
These days it’s hardly employed in the US, where its last recorded use was by the folksy President Truman in 1952. Saying that his grandfather used to tell him that when you heard someone praying loudly in public, “you had better go home and lock your smokehouse,” Truman denounced Republicans with the term “snollygosters” as an alternative to describing them as “bastards” (as he quaintly put it, ”a snollygoster is a man born out of wedlock”).ofcoursehewasimmediatelycorrected by the language mavens of the day, who quoted this splendid definition by an unnamed editor in the Columbus Dispatch of Ohio, on October 28, 1895: “a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophicalassumnacy”. (Don’t ask me to explain the last word: it doesn’t exist outside this definition.)
Truman continued to use the word: his correspondence with his former Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, reveals Truman lamenting that President Eisenhower had given in to congressional “snollygosters”– unprincipled politicians.
Snollygoster was reputedly popularised “almost singlehandedly” by a Georgia Democrat, H. J. W. Ham, who travelled around the US during the 1890s with a stump speech titled “The Snollygoster in Politics,” defining the word as a “place-hunting demagogue” or a “political hypocrite.” But Ham was a little too precise in his definition. He said: “A snollygoster is one with an unquenchable thirst for office with neither the power to get it nor the ability to fill it.”
I prefer the “shrewd and unprincipled” definition myself, because it is more widely applicable, including to politicians who are indeed able to get the office they cynically aspire to. In our country, alas, where politicians are all too often guided by personal advantage rather than by consistent values, ideological beliefs or moral principles, it is widely believed that to become successful in the world of politics one has to be an accomplished snollygoster.