| pork barrel | |
| —n | |
| slang chiefly (US) | |
| a. a bill or project requiring considerable government spending in a locality to the benefit of the legislator's constituents | |
| b. (as modifier): pork-barrel spending | |
| [C20: term originally applied to the Federal treasury considered as a source of lucrative grants] | |
| a fool or simpleton; ninny. |
| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |
pork barrel
Government funding of something that benefits a particular district, whose legislator thereby wins favor with local voters. For example, Our senator knows the value of the pork barrel. This expression alludes to the fatness of pork, equated with political largesse since the mid-1800s. [c. 1900]