IF nothing else positive comes out of the MPs’ expenses scandal, at least we can rejoice at the return of the wonderful word “snollygoster”.

A silly spat this week in Gloucester has led to the Tory candidate demanding that the sitting Labour MP publish all his expenses so that voters “could see he isn’t a snollygoster”.

What a word. Roll it round your tongue and spit it out in disgust: snollygoster.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it began life as two German words: schnelle geister, meaning “quick spirits”.

A schnelle geister was a scary, ghostly apparition, and a snollygoster was a mythical monster in Maryland, US, designed to scare the former slaves into not voting.

They were told that if they did, the snollygoster – a vast reptilian bird of prey – would swoop from the skies to steal their children.

In the 19th Century, snollygoster was applied to calculatingly dubious people. Today, the OED helpfully defines it as “a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician”.

You know the sort – the type who’d claim interest on a mortgage that doesn’t exist.

Sadly, snollygoster is not well-used, and its infrequent reappearances always demand a definition. For example, the Columbus Dispatch, in Ohio, was grateful when it received help in 1895. It said: “A Georgia editor kindly explains that a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office regardless of party, platform or principle, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy.”

There was plenty of talknophical assumnacy on Question Time the other night.

In 1915, the Nebraska State Journal used the word even more appropriately. It said: “We once knew a miserly old snollygoster who used to look in the mirror to see a reflection of a saint.”

Some MPs filled in their expenses forms with cynical deliberation – £1,645 for a floating duck house, £2,115 for moat clearance – but looked in the mirror and saw paragons of virtue staring back.

AFTER last week’s article on wisteria, reader John Gray points to a much better explanation of how it came by its name.

Every village I’ve been to in south Durham this week has had pendulous blooms of violet-blue wisteria hanging from vines creeping up their older properties.

Wisteria is originally Chinese. It reached England from Canton in 1816. We first knew it as Glycinia, from the Greek for sweet.

But in 1818, Caspar Wistar died. He was a doctor from Philadelphia who, somewhere along life’s journey, became friendly with Thomas Nuttall, who hailed from the village of Long Preston, near Settle, North Yorkshire, who started as an apprentice printer, but got the botany bug and in 1808 sailed to the States to see what he could find.

In 1811, he was pushing 1,500 miles up the Missouri River into hostile Indian territory, collecting plants as he went.

In 30 years in the US, he published many books about botany and birds. He came home in 1841, apparently his late uncle’s will said that to inherit his property, he had to live in England nine months a year. Nuttall died in Merseyside in 1859 and has several plants and woodpeckers named after him.

When someone pointed out he had misspelled Wistar when naming wisteria, Nuttall said the word was “chosen for euphony”

– but that explanation will have to wait as the snollygosters have claimed so much of this week’s space.