Word Woman

Welcome to another synapse-sizzling episode of Word Woman's Weekly Workout! Keep your brain firing on all four cylinders with the Word of the Week. In recognition of the fact that 2008 is an election year, here is a bit of political terminology:

Boondoggle: [noun] (claimed to have been coined as a name for an ornamental leather cord) an extravagant and useless project. According to the New York Times, "boondoggle" is simply a term applied back in the pioneer days to what we call gadgets today. -- "Hatchet Jobs and Hardball: The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang", Grant Barrett, ed., Oxford University Press, 2004.

Example: The construction of a Rube Goldberg device - a complex series of mechanisms which must be set up and timed to go off precisely in sequence in order to accomplish a task which could much more easily be done by hand - could accurately be considered a boondoggle.