comes from the 19th-century American practice of selling cure-all elixirs in traveling medicine shows. Snake oil salesmen would falsely claim that the potions would cure any ailments. now-a-days it refers to fake products.
by x March 12, 2004
by beavis March 23, 2003
any dubious or fraudulent remedy or cure (The route of the fraud the word is derived from resulted from a misunderstanding of a traditional Chinese joint and muscle painkiller derived from the skin of the Chinese water snake)
by The Return of Light Joker November 19, 2007
by thahib October 12, 2009
When someone oversimplifies a task in order to get your buy-in. This is something done typically by sales people in order to clinch a sale, or by software management in order to convince developers to assign small estimates to large and complicated tasks
That mgmt slide show was a total snake-oil simplification! When you think about it for a few minutes its clear that providing the functionality described will be a lot more complicated than just plugging component A into server B. Who agreed to the effort estimates on this anyway!?!? We're screwed man, we'll never make this date!
by Joe Swift January 31, 2008
Yes, I am taking hydroxychloroquine and yes I own stock in it and no, I am not The Snake Oil President!
by Dr Bunnygirl May 24, 2020