I used this word in last week’s post, and a friend pointed out that it’s a bit of an odd one. So I thought I’d look into it a bit further. And it turns out it has a pretty interesting backstory (so thanks, Lorna).
Jiggery-pokery means dishonest or suspicious activity. It hit the headlines in 2015 when American Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia used it in a legal argument against his colleagues’ reasoning in a decision about Obamacare, accusing them of ‘interpretive jiggery-pokery’. This quintessentially British phrase isn’t used that much outside of our shores, and certainly not in American legal writing (although Scalia has form for using these types of words – apparently he wrote the word ‘argle-bargle’ in another decision previously). The earliest-known use of jiggery-pokery in writing was in the Berkshire Chronicle in 1845. But it goes back much earlier than that.
The first part comes from a Scottish word, ‘jouk’, which means to twist your body to avoid a blow. This later became ‘joukery’ or ‘jookery’ to describe underhand dealing or trickery. The second part comes from ‘pawky’, another Scottish word which means something is artfully shrewd (a ‘pawk’ is a trick). By 1686, some bright spark combined the two to come up with ‘joukery-pawkery’, used to refer to clever trickery or sleight of hand. You can find this in Sir Walter Scott’s 1816 novel The Black Dwarf (which doesn’t sound very PC):
‘…I canna shake mysell loose o’ the belief that there has been some jookery-paukery of Satan’s in a’ this…’
It wasn’t long before joukery-pawkery morphed into the more familiar jiggery pokery we get today.
(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, ‘argle-bargle’ is copious but meaningless talk or writing, or waffle.)