NEW SERIES – WEASEL WORD WATCH
By Gareth van Onselen
Introduction
What is a ‘weasel word’?
Wikipedia offers the following definition:
“A weasel word is a word that is intended to, or has the effect of, softening the force of a potentially loaded or otherwise controversial statement… According to The Macmillan Dictionary of Contemporary Phrase and Fable: ‘…weasel words are words that suck the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks the egg and leaves the shell.’ Thus, weasel words suck the meaning out of a statement while seeming to keep the idea intact, and are particularly associated with political pronouncements. Weasel words are used euphemistically… Generally, weasel terms are statements that are misleading because they lack the normal substantiations of their truthfulness, as well as the background information against which these statements are made. Weasel terms are the equivalent of spin in the political sphere in British English.”
The Australian author Don Watson – who used to work as a speech writer for Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating – is one of a very few experts on the subject.
His book “Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Cliches, Cant and Management Jargon” says the following:
“It was in a democracy that the term ‘weasel word’ first appeared: in the United States, around the end of the nineteenth century. In 1916 Theodore Roosevelt declared that the tendency to use what have been called weasel words was ‘one of the defects of our nation. You can have universal training or you can have voluntary training, but when you use the word ‘voluntary’ to qualify the word ‘universal’, you are using a weasel word,’ he said: ‘it has sucked all meaning out of universal’.”
Elsewhere Watson states:
“Weasel words are the words of the powerful, the treacherous and the unfaithful, spies, assassins and thieves. Bureaucrats and ideologues love them. Tyrants cannot do without them… Totalitarian states use weasel words to hide truth and slew or complicate meaning. They use them, as they use clichés and other dead forms, to exercise and maintain power.”
There is some overlap between the idea of a cliché and that of a weasel word. Both, in broad terms, have the same effect – to avoid specificity and detail, and to hide or obscure meaning. Perhaps the only distinction is that while a cliché does have a certain kind of meaning - however jaded or generic - weasel words tend to reduce meaning and almost always prompt a series of follow-up questions in an attempt to gain clarity.
Kinds of weasel words
The Wikipedia page on weasel words contains some very helpful examples, which are well worth reading.
That said, for the sake of convenience, it is worth distinguishing political weasel words – that is, weasel words that appear in political language – from those that appear elsewhere (in business jargon for example), if only because politics is the key concern of this blog.
Within politics then, I believe there are two types of weasel words – those that are used deliberately, to obscure meaning; and those used unintentionally, usually out of intellectual laziness or a poor grasp of the English language.
(The intentional use of the weasel word can itself vary from the misleading to the horrific. As Don Watson points out, for example, under Stalin the Soviet Union used to record death by starvation and abuse in slave camps as “failure of the heart muscle”. There are various parallel examples from apartheid South Africa.)
Here are two contemporary examples - one of the unintentional use of weasel words and one of the intentional use - by way of illustration.
Examples
• The unintentional weasel word:
On 5 Augu
| Posted on 13/8/2007
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