Meaning
Used as a modifier, as in pork-barrel spending or pork-barrel politics: government money channelled into local projects whose real purpose is to win a politician support in their home district rather than to serve the national interest. Derogatory, and almost entirely confined to American political usage. Derogatory political register; in American English it clusters with 'earmarks' and 'logrolling'. Regional use: American English.
Origin
Literally a barrel of salt pork, a standard way of storing meat before refrigeration; Wiktionary labels the literal sense as dating from the 18th century. The figurative use predates the 1870s appropriations era usually associated with the term: Edward Everett Hale's story 'The Children of the Public' (Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, January 1863) already used the pork barrel as a metaphor for public money distributed to citizens. After the Civil War the term turned derogatory, and by the 1870s members of Congress were routinely accused of lining up 'pork'; Wikipedia reports that the OED dates the modern political sense to 1910 and that Chester Collins Maxey's 1919 article 'A Little History of Pork' popularized the term. The often-repeated story that the phrase derives from pre-Civil War plantation barrels of salt pork rationed to enslaved people rests on Maxey's retrospective 1919 account rather than contemporary evidence, and should be treated as unverified.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- Pork
- Pork-barrel legislation
- Pork-barrel politics
- Pork-barrel spending
Usage Examples
- Critics dismissed the new courthouse as pure pork barrel designed to protect two incumbents.
- Pork-barrel spending is hard to kill because every district wants its own bridge or base.
- The senator boasted about the defence contracts, which opponents called textbook pork barrel.