Just a Patzer?

Today being April Fools' Day, it seems an appropriate time to revisit the controversy surrounding the origin of the word patsy.

Among the secrets that Lee Harvey Oswald took to the grave is what he had in mind when he famously described himself as "just a patsy." Are you reading this, Oliver Stone?

In his On Language column on April Fools' Day in 1984, William Safire gave two possible provenances: the Italian word pazzo meaning "fool", or the diminutive for Patrick which in the criminal underworld became synonymous with "sucker".

The Word Detective defines a patsy as "a person who can be victimized by an unscrupulous party in a number of ways, ranging from being defrauded in a rigged card game to being set up to be blamed for (or to bear the entire blame for) something", adding that the word "may have been drawn from Patsy Bolivar, a character in a popular 18th century minstrel show who always ended up being blamed for everything."

I have heard an occasional chess player use the words patsy and patzer interchangeably, as in: "My opponent played like a patsy" when clearly patzer is intended.

Michael Goeller in The Kenilworthian gives Dr. Helen Weissenstein's research which "argues against Jim West's conjecture that the word patsy (from the Italian word for fool or pazzo according to William Safire) may be connected to patzer, especially since there is no sense in which a patsy can be said to have an inflated self-image."

The only problem I have with this argument is that my Google searches reveal that the primary meaning of the Italian word pazzo is "madman" or "lunatic", and we certainly don't think of a patsy as being insane!

So was Lee Harvey Oswald "just a patzer"? Remember what today's date is!