Svengali

By Deane Barker • •

This is someone who dominates another person and manipulates them to achieve gain from their talents.

An example would be a talent manager who latches onto a young star and forcefully guides their career to make themselves rich, ignoring what they actually want to do with their lives.

It comes from the name of a character in a 1894 novel that does exactly this for a young singer.

Why I Looked It Up

I knew the gist of the word, but wanted to know where it came from.

Then in Conspiracy of Fools, Louis Borget is described as:

Enron’s earnings svengali

This is an interesting usage. It implies that Borget dominated and forcefully used Enron to earn money for himself – which is actually pretty accurate to history.

Links from this – Conspiracy of Fools November 23, 2022
This is the long-form story of the collapse of Enron. It was published in 2005, which means some major events were still pending (Ken Lay died suddenly in 2006; Jeff Skilling’s trial also happened in 2006; etc). Here’s the thing with Enron – The company existed in a very weird field of “energy...