While random reading I ran across this in “From ‘Tractors’ to Cell Therapy Clinics: Unproven Medical Procedures,” Curtis E. Margo, Skeptical Inquirer (September/October 2025, paywall) …
[Historian James Harvey Young (1915–2006) ] named the chapter [in The Toadstool Millionaires] featuring Elisha Perkins “Galvanizing Trumpery.” He created this memorable pun by linking the dual meanings of the verb to galvanize with the word trumpery from fifteenth-century French (tromperie, “to deceive”), which later in English would come to mean “worthless” and “of no or little value.”
I’m not sure this is a pun, although the subject, Mr Perkins, was engaged in electricity-related scamming (in the late 18th century), and galvanizing has an electricity-related definition, also known as electrogalvanizing.
But that is beside the point, which is really below me, but it being a Saturday morning a bit of humor is in order, and if it’s at the expense of proponents of uninhibited wealth-pursuit, so much the better.
