Alaskan Range: Weasel Words
"Weasel words'' is an informal term for words and phrases that, whilst communicating a vague or ambiguous claim, create an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said. Weasel words may also have the effect of softening the force of potentially loaded or otherwise controversial statements through some form of understatement.
Master wordsman Greg Hill gives some fine examples of the ignoble art of weasel wording.
The winners of last year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest were announced recently, and most of the entries were long meandering sentences befitting the contest’s namesake. Edward Bulwer-Lytton was an extremely popular novelist and playwright in Victorian England, but his authorial style didn’t age well. As the Wikipedia article on him states, Bulwer-Lytton possessed “a certain broad style of writing, characterized by a self-serious attempt at dramatic flair, the imitation of formulaic styles, an extravagantly florid style, redundancies, confusing syntax, and sentences … that are exceedingly lengthy.”
The famous first line in his 1830 novel “Paul Clifford”, for example, is “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at rare intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
Bulwer-Lytton’s not read much these days, but the “dark and stormy night” line entered modern popular culture when “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz used it in a comic on July 12, 1965. Schulz used the gag in his strip repeatedly over the years, always featuring Snoopy, the thinking man’s dog, who invariably began novels with the first part of Bulwer-Lytton’s infamous opener. It also inspired the writing contest named for him, which has been sponsored by San Jose State University since 1982. Their website, www.bulwer-lytton.com, has the winning entries for past years as well as the current crop, and my favorite of the latter is the briefer “Runner-Up” winner, though it sounds more like an ending than a beginning: “In a flurry of flame and fur, fangs and wicker, thus ended the world’s first and only hot air baboon ride.” The loftier winners all hewed closer to Bulwer-Lytton’s example.
Worse than that Victorian’s writing is the rising prevalence of weasel words in modern discourse. Wikipedia has a strong, well authenticated article on “weasel words”, “an informal term for words and phrases that, whilst communicating a vague or ambiguous claim, create an impression that something specific and meaningful has been said … Weasel words may also have the effect of softening the force of potentially loaded or otherwise controversial statements through some form of understatement, for example using detensifiers such as ‘somewhat’ or ‘in most respects’ .”
The phrase first appeared in print in a Century Magazine short story, “Stained Glass Political Platform” in 1900, in which “weasel words” were described as “words that suck the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks the egg and leaves the shell.” It was a favorite expression of Teddy Roosevelt, who maintained that he heard it spoken in 1879 by his boyhood friend, Dave Sewell. Roosevelt believed “one of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use ‘weasel words’, ” and I blanch at what he’d think today.
Weasel words come in many flavors, such as “Numerically vague expressions (e.g., ‘some people’, ‘experts’, ‘many’)”, “Use of the passive voice to avoid specifying an authority (e.g., ‘it is said’)”, and “Adverbs which detensify (e.g., ‘often’, ‘probably’).” Others include “vague generalizations”, “non sequitur statements”, and “use of euphemisms (e.g., replacing ‘firing staff’ with ‘streamlining the workforce’).”
Advertising and politics seem to be the main culprits, and the library has marvelous ammunition for aspiring weaselers, such as Don Watson’s “Death Sentences: How Clichés, Weasel Words, and Management-Speak Are Strangling Public Language.” Watson’s website, www.weaselwords.com.au, is full of horrible examples sent in by frustrated readers.
Alas, weasel words afflict even the winning 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Contest entry by David McKenzie, a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant from Federal Way, Washington: “Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the ‘Ellie May,’ a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”
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