quockerwodger

English

Pronunciation

• Audio (Southern England):

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Noun

quockerwodger (plural quockerwodgers)

1. A wooden toy figure that jerks its limbs when a string is pulled.
   • 1924, Walter Julius Bloem, The Soul of the Moving Picture, page 36:

     Just hand the old quockerwodger over to me! I'll cut him in half and each part will dance on the rope just as comically as you please!

   • 1969, Donald Barr Chidsey, The War in the South, page 37:

     Lee was a scarecrow, cantankerous, acidulous, arrogant, breathlessly ugly, as jerky as a quockerwodger, but he knew more about the art of war, as it was breathlessly called, than anybody else in America […]

2. (figurative, by extension) A puppet; a person whose actions are controlled by somebody else.
   • 1944, Morris Allison Bealle, Washington Squirrel Cage, page 9:

     They felt that the fellow was a quockerwodger rather than a politician, an againster rather than a true American, an oppositionist in fundamental things rather than a sincere patriot.

References

• John Camden Hotten (1873) The Slang Dictionary