Idiom
snake oil
Meaning
A fraudulent, ineffective potion or nostrum; panacea.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“That diet pill is just snake oil.”
“The salesman promised his miracle cure would fix everything, but doctors warned it was pure snake oil.”
“In an age of misinformation, unproven supplements marketed as panaceas proliferate online, modern iterations of the snake oil peddled by nineteenth-century hucksters.”
Examples
simple
“That diet pill is just snake oil.”
contextual
“The salesman promised his miracle cure would fix everything, but doctors warned it was pure snake oil.”
complex
“In an age of misinformation, unproven supplements marketed as panaceas proliferate online, modern iterations of the snake oil peddled by nineteenth-century hucksters.”
Key words
Related idioms
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