A
slang term describing someone who is
gullible and easy to take
advantage of. A patsy is an
easy mark at cards, because he'll never catch on that you've got an extra
ace up your sleeve. Hell, a patsy is an easy
mark on everything -- you can
laugh at him, make
jokes at his expense,
steal from him, and he'll either never
catch on, or he'll catch on
too late.
A patsy is also someone who can be made to take the
blame for something, especially for a
crime. When
Sam Spade says someone's making a patsy of him, he means someone's
doctored a
frame-up job on him and intends for him to take the
rap while they get off
scot-free. It isn't even like you have to be
innocent or a
sucker to be a patsy -- the other members of your gang can make you the patsy for the whole
job, either by dropping secret calls to the
cops to make you the
fall guy or by cutting a
deal with the
D.A. Lousy squealin' rats.
No one's entirely certain how this
term came about. It might be from the
Italian word for "
fool",
pazzo.
sighmoan adds:
"Patsy: Harpo Marx's character in the stage production, "Fun In Hi Skule" (possibly also "Horse Feathers", which borrowed the classroom scene)." Yeah, that's another possibility. A constant problem with determining the origins of slang is that there are nearly always multiple sources that a term
could have come from. It coulda been "pazzo"; it coulda been Harpo; heck, it coulda been some notoriously gullible Irishman... And it coulda been a combination...
NothingLasts4ever points out:
"Pazzo is more crazy than foolish..." Duly noted...
Research: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition and WordNet 1.6