Reader Rob van Hemert (thank you Rob) asked me to look into the origins of the word “hoodwink”, which sounds like it has all sorts of interesting etymological potential.
I was expecting something to do with gangsters and con-artists winking at each other as they threw a metaphorical hood over some unsuspecting “mark” or victim, while deceiving him or her into willingly handing over whatever it is they wanted.
As it turns out, “hoodwink” has a far more commonplace history which has merely to do with eyes and hoods. The Online Etymology Dictionary says “hoodwink” was first used in the 1560s, when it literally meant “to blindfold”. In the 1600s it began to be used figuratively, in the same way as pulling the wool over someone’s eyes.
Hoodwink is not quite as popular a word as it used to be, but it still appears here and there. Trusty old Google delivered these results from a news search of the past week: “banks and debt collectors are hoodwinking the public into paying debts that lapsed”; “for how much longer will the ANC hoodwink its own members and followers?”; “YouTube videos of fake Indian cricket matches were convincing enough to hoodwink Russian gamblers”; and my favourite, from Wales Online, “a compulsive con man who has spent two decades adopting 21 different aliases to scam victims out of hundreds of thousands of pounds is back behind bars. Sebastian Astbury has previously posed as an MI5 agent, a banker, a lord, a Royal Navy officer, a Royal Marine, a property developer, a shipping magnate, a winemaker and a luxury car salesman to hoodwink his victims.”
Now that’s a master hoodwinker.
On a less dramatic note, some people feel there is much hoodwinkery in the lucrative art of motivational speaking.
One of the most-watched “gurus” in the emotional self-help video arena is Brené Brown, who to be fair is a bona fide research professor at the University of Houston, but whose recent fame and dollars are due to online talks on vulnerability, shame and empathy.
On a less dramatic note, some people feel that there is much hoodwinkery in the lucrative art of motivational speaking.
These are worthy and notable concepts that deserve more attention. The cynics among us, however, start wondering whether increasingly astronomic levels of attention have to do with the content or with the attention itself.
I shall not attempt to draw swords with Prof Brown, whose advice is famously practical and down-to-earth.
“The bottom line: I believe you have to walk through vulnerability to get to courage, therefore ... embrace the suck,” she says in her website biography, which also informs viewers she is “the author of six number-one New York Times best-sellers”.
The reason so many people find Prof Brown irresistible might be because she is brilliant or it might be bandwaggonery. We should be prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt and believe she has no desire to hoodwink anyone into believing their lives will be sad and dismal and incomplete unless they buy at least one of her books or sign up for her podcasts.
There is one thing I can’t quite get past, however, and that is Prof Brown’s interminable and incessant use of the word “agency”.
In the Brown universe, “agency” means taking ownership of or responsibility for your own actions, as opposed to letting events toss you around and wash you up like an onion on the beach at low tide.
Agency itself is not a terrible word. There are advertising agencies and model agencies and there used to be news agencies, which sold stationery as well as dailies, weeklies and periodicals, if anyone remembers such words. (You can understand why the long-suffering Central News Agency changed its name to CNA.)
In the sense made popular by Brown, however, “agency” is somewhat annoying. Why not just say “responsibility”?
This sense of agency is properly elucidated in a paper by British psychologist James Moore. In “What is the sense of agency and why does it matter?”, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology in 2016, Moore writes: “Sense of agency refers to the feeling of control over actions and their consequences.”
If this is what Prof Brown wishes to give her audience, it is certainly admirable. I’d love to have a feeling of control over where a column might end up before I begin writing it.
This agency business still irks, though, and I’m not the only one who finds the word awkward. In a discussion about Brownian psychology on a South African radio station recently, one of the speakers was clearly struggling to recall the word. He said: “We all need to have emotional ... um ... emotional ... real estate!”
I’d make an offer on that, for sure.
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