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A boondoggle is an official plan or activity that looks busy and organised but a lot of time, money, and effort. People throw it at government or company projects they think are or pointless — a building nobody uses, a study that goes nowhere. It is informal American English, very much a newspaper and word. You can also use it as a verb: to boondoggle is to waste time and money in that official-looking way. Though actually it did not start as an insult. In 1929 an American scout leader, Robert H. Link, used it (also written “boon doggle”) for a braided leather craft the scouts made. In 1935 newspapers attacking New Deal work programmes said people were being paid to sit around making those braids, and the “wasteful official project” meaning stuck.
勞民傷財的計畫；浪費公帑的工程（美式，多用來罵官方計畫）。
組成Coined in 1929 by American scout leader Robert H. Link; also written “boon doggle.” First a scout braid (the scout word woggle is from the same period and a similar craft sense). The wasteful-programme meaning was spread in 1935 by The New York Times, aimed at New Deal projects.
原始詞典資料5 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
boondogglenoun/ˈbuːndɒɡl̩/
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A braided ring to hold a neckerchief.
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governmentpoliticsA waste of time or money; a pointless activity.
- Opponents consider this another billion-dollar government boondoggle.
- Senator John Stennis […] has been active and effective for so long as a member of the Armed Services Committee that he knows as well as any man can where the bodies are buried in the Pentagon and the boondoggles are buried in the defense budget.
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A trip or journey, especially a recreational or otherwise desirable one.
- By its strictest definition, a boondoggle is a recreational trip out of town, but it has been blurred by threadbare jokes to mean any trip that is desirable, whether for work or not.
- I could die on this boondoggle too, naturally, as the world has become something of a horror show of late. In any case, I trust that anybody following in my footsteps and reading these additional words will have the presence of mind to pursue the same basic strategy.
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slangA trip or journey, especially a recreational or otherwise desirable one.
- A non-work excursion away from the station in US Antarctic English is a “boondoggle”, or a “jolly” for the Britons.
boondoggleverb/ˈbuːndɒɡl̩/
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To waste time on a pointless activity.
- These days the astronaut job title has been split into two categories. (Three, counting payload specialist, the category into which teachers, boondoggling senators, and junketing Saudi princes fall.)
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。