A boondoggle is a project that is considered a waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy or political motivations.
A boondoggle is a project that is considered a waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy or political motivations.
== Etymology == Boondoggle|thumb "Boondoggle" was the name of the newspaper of the Roosevelt Troop of the Boy Scouts, based in Rochester, New York, and it first appeared in print in 1927. From there it passed into general use in scouting in the 1930s. It was attributed to a boy scout from Rochester who coined the term to describe "a new type of uniform decoration". After the presentation of honorific boondoggles at a World Jamboree, the use of the word spread to other troops and branches. An Oakland scout troop presented a "boondoggle" as an award for attendees who spent seven days and nights at Camp Dimond. That boondoggle was described as a "red leather strip which terminates in a red wooden diamond on which is painted the number 1930." The "boondoggle" was described in the Ogden Standard-Examiner in 1930 as a hand-made item crafted from brightly colored leather strips. In 1931, it was similarly described as a "bright lanyard made of leatherstrip".
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).