Coming up on Word Matters, some terms for people and things better avoided.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Amon Shea,
Peter Sokolowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
We all know it's unwise to buy snake oil from snake oil salesmen.
But we all also know that there's nothing truly reptilian involved with either the oil or the purveyor,
which naturally leads to this question.
Who put the snake in snake oil?
Or did the term originally have to do with the scaly, slithery ones?
Ammon fills us in.
English is this wonderful descriptive language and one of the things that's so enjoyable about it is that it mixes both the figurative and the literal in kind of equal measure sometimes.
And so we have a lot of terms and words like the one that comes to mind is snake oil which kind of raises the question of does snake oil actually come from snakes and
as is so often the answer to this is either yes or yes you probably wish you hadn't asked the question but snake oil is not actually used in the even semi literal sense anymore it's used mostly with the meaning of we define it
as poppycock are bunkum,
meaning something that is untrue.
But you're saying it did originally refer to oil derived from the body of a snake?
Well,
the earliest meaning that we have is we define it as any of various substances or mixtures sold as by a traveling medicine show as medicine,
usually without regard to their medical worth or properties.
which is not actually saying that there was snake oil in this.