snake oil
English
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Etymology
(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium. Particularly: “Some sources derive it from Seneca oil rather than from snake.”)
Pronunciation
Audio (AU) (file)
Noun
snake oil (uncountable)
- (idiomatic) A fraudulent, ineffective potion or nostrum; panacea.
- A traditional Chinese medicine used to treat joint pain.
- A type of 19th-century patent medicine sold in the United States that claimed to contain snake fat, supposedly a Native American remedy for various ailments.
- (idiomatic) Any product with exaggerated marketing but questionable or unverifiable quality.
- 2022 January 12, Nigel Harris, “Comment: Unhappy start to 2022”, in RAIL, number 948, page 3:
- As for the IRP, Secretary of State Grant Shapps continues to peddle snake oil, smoke and mirrors. His reaction to near-universal IRP condemnation from politicians, local and national media, and all but a few rail specialists was to dismiss the lot of us (in the condescending and patronising tone we have now come to expect) as "critics and naysayers".
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Translations
fraudulent, ineffective potion or nostrum
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traditional Chinese medicine
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Verb
snake oil (third-person singular simple present snake oils, present participle snake oiling, simple past and past participle snake oiled)
- (slang) To dupe or con.
- 1995, Nancy Owen Nelson (ed.), Private Voices, Public Lives:
- And this is particularly so for many of our women students who have been hustled and snake-oiled to deny the validity of their intellects.
- 2013, Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge, Vintage 2014, p. 23:
- Before she had a chance to deal with her hangover, he was on the phone snake-oiling her into the first of what would be many ill-fated fraud cases.
- 1995, Nancy Owen Nelson (ed.), Private Voices, Public Lives:
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