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Coined by American scout leader Robert H. Link in 1929; alternatively “boon doggle”. Compare woggle of similar sense, which is attested in the same period. In the sense of a “wasteful government program”, popularized in 1935 by The New York Times, in reference to New Deal programs which were claimed to feature people making such braids.
Senator John Stennis has been active and effective for so long as a member of the Armed Services Committee that he knows as well as any man can where the bodies are buried in the Pentagon and the boondoggles are buried in the defense budget.
2005, Nicholas Johnson, “Chapter 3 Notes”, in Big Dead Place, →ISBN:
By its strictest definition, a boondoggle is a recreational trip out of town, but it has been blurred by threadbare jokes to mean any trip that is desirable, whether for work or not.
2014 March 24, Adam Reed, “On the Carpet” (18:08 from the start), in Archer, season 5, episode 9, spoken by Malory Archer (Jessica Walter):
“Oh, for the-- how much did you waste on that little boondoggle?” “Well, it's not that so much as--” “Krieger.” “Well, I needed ballast, and what better to simulate bricks of cocaine than, you know, bricks of cocaine.”
2014 November 6, Rob Nixon, “Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’”, in New York Times:
Klein dismantles the boondoggle that is cap and trade.
2019 May 2, “Iter, a reactor in France, may deliver fusion power as early as 2045”, in The Economist, →ISSN:
For cynics, it is a boondoggle plagued by delays (it began in 2007 and was supposed to begin experiments in 2016, but this will not now happen until 2025), questionable management and ballooning costs (double the original estimate).
boondoggle on Wikipedia.Wikipedia 