Since 1992
Print and digital marketing
By Barbara McAllister
Word of the Day: Woggle
Evidence has been found that humans have been tying knots as far back as 3,500 B.C. It is an activity that many people underappreciate but use in everyday life, whether tying a shoelace or securing a boat. The art of knot tying was once an essential skill in professions ranging from sailing to farming, and today is becoming a more and more specialized craft, moving from the utilitarian to the artistic. One knot that is both artistic and functional is a Turk’s Head, or Monkey Fist. The Turk’s Head is not a single knot, but comprises a family of interwoven complex-looking knots. The instruction for tying the complex knot mentions that Turk’s Head knots are “commonly used for woggles.” The directions casually drop the term, assuming the reader knows what a woggle is. If the reader was a Boy Scout or someone familiar with Scouting, this might be true. I had to look it up to make sure it was a real word.
The dictionary defines a woggle as a ring of leather, metal, cord or other material through which a Scout neckerchief is threaded. The word woggle was used by Scout founder Lord Robert Baden-Powell in his 1929 manual, “Scouting for Boys,” and the term seems particular to Scouting.
The item was originally “boondoggle” in America, a word attributed to Robert Link, a scoutmaster for the Boy Scouts of America in the 1920s. Link presented a braided cord worn by Scouts to
the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) at the 1929 World Scout Jamboree. Link is said to have coined the word “boondoggle” as a term for the braided cords scouts used for neckerchief slides, hatbands and lanyards. In August 1931, the Daily Messenger of Canandaigua, New York, wrote: “The boondoggle … leaped literally into fame overnight when it was introduced by Rochester Boy Scouts at the jamboree in England…. So fascinating do the boys find it, that they have spent practically all their spare time on the work.”
In America, the word boondoggle became associated with made-up work and government waste following a 1935 New York Times article published about the huge amounts of aid money spent on unnecessary projects during the Great Depression, like teaching the jobless to make small items of leather, rope or canvas.
The term woggle seems to be applied only to neckerchief slides, and is used interchangeably with boondoggle. It remains unclear which word came first. It is theorized that because woggle rhymes with doggle, both similar to toggle, the word boondoggle somehow evolved. Or perhaps it happened vice versa. The chicken-egg controversy rages on among Scouts as to the knotty problem of which word came first – woggle or boondoggle?
