[early 21st century American protologism, 'numbskull', dimwit; dolt + 'skulduggery', mean dishonesty or trickery]
n.
A strategy, action, or conspiracy marked by outright stupidity and undertaken with malign intent.
February 16, 2009
QOTD:
“ Once, the Guardian Notes & Queries column had a question in it, asking what the economic consequences would be if suddenly God stepped in and made us all honest, and made it so we all knew that we were all honest. The idea was that it would quickly result in economic collapse; between security guards, ticket inspectors, makers of Tensator queue management equipment, some ungodly part of a modern economy is based on people being employed to check up on one another. It was quite a good laugh as a thought experiment about an economy exposed to a sudden technology shock. But of course, the world would get used to it, and a new economy would grow up based on our universal trust, and one with a much higher average standard of living, since basically unproductive labour would be replaced by the production of goods and services. What would happen to such an economy if the devil came in and reintroduced dishonesty? Absolute collapse, surely; vast amounts of previously productive effort would have to be diverted once more to constantly checking that relationships which had previously been implicitly recognised to be completely free of risk were actually valid and that every single party to a transaction could be relied upon to meet their obligations. If you had a system of relationships based on more or less unquestioning trust, and then you broke that trust, how on earth could you expect the system to function again until the basis of that trust was somehow replaced?
