Wordorigins.org

This term meaning a useless task or wasteful endeavor is of uncertain origin, although it is probably related to the word woggle, a term for a Boy Scout’s neckerchief fastener. Boondoggle also has the meaning of a neckerchief fastener or slide in Boy Scout circles and this is likely the original sense of the word.

Woggle makes its appearance in 1923 among scouts in Britain. From The Scout, 9 June 1923:

Wear a scarf woggle.

Woggle is likely related to toggle, the original meaning of which is a pin used to keep a rope in place on shipboard. This sense of toggle dates to the mid-18th century.

The scout connection to boondoggle is made through the claim of an American scoutmaster, Robert Link of Rochester, NY, who claimed to have coined the term as a nickname for his son c.1925. Link said he applied the word boondoggle to a neckerchief slide in 1929. Link’s claim, however, is not substantiated by evidence other than the dates being consistent with known usage. While it may be true, we cannot know for sure. He first made the claim of coinage in 1935, after the term had gained widespread use.

The earliest known appearance of boondoggle in print is in the New York Times on 4 April 1935:

“Boon doggles” is simply a term applied back in the pioneer days to what we call gadgets today.

A 4 October 1935 citation from the Chicago Tribune explains how the sense shifted from gadget to wasteful effort:

To the cowboy it meant the making of saddle trappings out of odds and ends of leather, and they boondoggled when there was nothing else to do on the ranch.

Despite what these citations say, there is no evidence that boondoggle had any currency among cowboys or on the American frontier. The term’s origin is probably in Boy Scout circles in the 1920s and the cowboy explanation was invented to explain the term and give it some panache.

1935 saw an explosion in use of the term and the modern senses, both noun and verb, to mean a wasteful effort. That year also saw the appearance of variant forms like boondoogler and boondoogling. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes wrote in his diary in that year:

I am for substantial, worth-while, and socially desirable public works, while Hopkins is for what has come to be known as boondoggling.

It is likely that the rapid growth of the federal government during the New Deal years, along with the waste that attends such government projects, created a need that this word filled nicely.

(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; Historical Dictionary of American Slang; American Speech, Vol. 59, No. 1, Spring 1984, pp. 93-95; Scout Information Centre, Gilwell Park, UK, http://www.scoutbase.org.uk)