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
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
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