Unnumbered source etymology
Original entry ↗A person who is easily manipulated, victimized, or made to take the blame for something. · A conspirator, secretly designated by co-conspirators to take full blame and punishment for a wrongdoing, particularly an assassination; a fall guy.
To treat (a person) as a patsy or sucker; to pin the blame on. · To mess around; to waste time.
The term dates back at least to the 1870s in the United States, close to the peak of Irish migration. The OED's recent revisions link Patsy with Pat and Paddy, the stereotype of the bogtrotter just off the boat. The American Heritage Dictionary and Online Etymology Dictionary quotes the OED it may derive from the Italian pazzo (“madman”), and souther Italian dialect paccio (“fool”). Another possibility is the term derives from Patsy Bolivar, a character in an 1880s minstrel skit who was blamed whenever anything went wrong, in Broadway musical comedies, for example in The Errand Boy [1904] and Patsy in Politics [1907].
Relationships mentioned by the source
These are extracted mentions, not a timeline or a verified sequence of immediate parents.
- Cognate mentionpazzoit
Inspect preserved source fields
Raw extraction fields are retained for auditing. Their order does not establish ancestry.
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"A conspirator, secretly designated by co-conspirators to take full blame and punishment for a wrongdoing, particularly an assassination; a fall guy."
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