Crossword clues for boondoggle
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
boondoggle \boon"dog*gle\ v.
a braided cord made by hand by young scouts, used for various purposes, such as a hat cord or a key chain.
a useless, wasteful, or impractical project; -- especially one authorized by a government agency as a favor to partisans, to employ unemployed people, or in return for corrupt payments.
boondoggle \boon"dog*gle\ v. to do useless, wasteful, or trivial work.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1935, American English, of uncertain origin, popularized during the New Deal as a contemptuous word for make-work projects for the unemployed. Said to have been a pioneer word for "gadget;" it also was by 1932 a Boy Scout term for a kind of woven braid.
Wiktionary
n. 1 A braided ring to hold a neckerchief, particularly in scouting; a woggle. 2 (context US English) A waste of time and/or money; a pointless activity. vb. (context intransitive English) To waste time on a pointless activity.
WordNet
n. work of little or no value done merely to look busy
v. do useless, wasteful, or trivial work
Wikipedia
A boondoggle is a scheme that wastes time and money.
Boondoggle or boon doggle may also refer to:
- Boondoggle (EP), an EP by The Lucksmiths
- Scoubidou, a knotting and plaiting craft known in the U.S. and Canada as "boondoggle"
- Gimp (thread), a type of thread used in making boondoggles and lanyards
- Woggle, a scout's neckerchief fixing known alternatively as a "boon doggle"
A boondoggle is a project that is considered a waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy or political motivations.
Boondoggle is an EP from The Lucksmiths released in 1994 on Candle Records (catalogue number LUCKY1.)
Usage examples of "boondoggle".
They are low, really, and we can keep them that way because our revenue goes to things other than fine new jails, federal grants and programs, make-work projects, investigating the sexual habits of a grubworm, and pork-barrel boondoggles.
All these Grigsby boondoggles had to be approved by port boss Lunetta.
But look at large-scale boondoggles such as the Grand Prix and the Lipton tennis tournament, which have transformed Bicentennial and Crandon parks respectively.
Also it shows why expensive boondoggles like Tunipah, aimed at supporting this kind of habit as well as making extortionate profits, are foisted on an unsuspecting public.
Trinity was a waste of time, that the bomb was a scientific boondoggle, a hoax, a dud.
The architect of the latest giveaway is County Manager Sergio Pereira, whoinvoking the Miss Universe Pageant Boondoggle Theoremsays the TV exposure makes the road races worth every nickel, tourist-wise.
May 10, 1992 The Lipton tennis boondoggle is in deep trouble, all of it self-made.
From Washington, Moonbase looked like an investment boondoggle, and Henry Kolladner had no wish to be associated with it, even if he had taken himself out of the running.
Tunipah boondoggle through the courts, and tie you up with appeals, injunctions, and every other legal blockage in the book.
He had excoriated the train then, as an example of the deranged values of government-dominated society, a costly boondoggle, a holdover of pre-millennial thinking.
It's combat all the way, so don't let yourse@f be boondoggled if you lose a skirmish or two.
Shall we talk about four submarines, each costing roughly one hundred and eighty million apiece, currently boondoggled in dry dock?
Allegations of cover-ups, misuse of the public's money, fraud and boondoggling were becoming the norm.
So here is a vast hog-barrel, boondoggling bribe to buy off the Negroes.
The much-promoted Strategic Defence Initiative is a Cold War boondoggle, and SDI is almost surely not long for this world, in either budgets or rhetoric -- but both Navstar and spy satellites have very promising futures, in and/or out of the military.