WEASEL WORDS

DOWN MEMORY LANE




They swallowed each other up


An uncle of mine, Balraj, who lived in England, visited us once in two years or so. Once while he was visiting us, another uncle from Palamcottah (Palayamkottai) also happened to come for a week’s stay. This uncle was called Peria Thambi by his elders. His younger brother was Chinna Thambi. My aunts called them Big Anna and Chinnanna.

A weasel in the morning

Big Thambi had the habit of eating two raw eggs every morning. He tapped the egg with a spoon till a small opening formed. Then he lifted his face, took the egg close to his mouth, and tossed the contents down his throat. Uncle Balraj who was watching this one morning said “A weasel !”. I didn’t know what a weasel was and so couldn’t understand why everyone was laughing. Later the word was explained to me. Weasel is a small animal of the stoat family that sucked eggs through a small opening it made in the shells. Shakespeare makes a reference to weasels in ‘As You Like It’. Jacques says “I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs”.

Later, I came across the term ‘weasel words’. The expression referred to words of convenient and deliberate ambiguity. This expression first became well known after Theodore Roosevelt used it in a speech criticising President Wilson. “The words universal voluntary have exactly the same effect an acid has on an alkali – a neutralizing effect. One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called ‘weasel words’. When a weasel sucks eggs, the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a weasel word after another there is nothing left of the other. Now, 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; it has sucked all the meaning out of ‘universal’. The two words flatly contradict each other.”

Light as a feather

It is probable that Roosevelt got the idea of weasel words from a story by Stewart Chaplin, ‘Stained Glass Political Platform’. “Weasel words are words that suck the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks an egg and leaves the shell. If you lift the egg afterwards, it is as light as a feather, and not very filling when you are hungry, but a basketful of them would make quite a show, and would bamboozle the unwary. I know them well, and mighty useful they are, too. Although the gentleman couldn’t write much of a platform, he is an expert in weaseling. I have seen him take his pen and go through a proposed plank or resolution and weasel every flatfooted word in it.”

Nearer home we have voluble politicians who talk a great deal but say very little. They add words for the sound rather than the meaning. So they speak in jingling rhymes or high-flown rhetoric which is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

These orators have their fans too, who cheer and applaud every rhyme whether it had reason or not. And these empty rhetorical devices won them votes and posts. In oratory here nothing succeeds like excess.

A person who indulges in political fence-straddling is said to be weaselling. Our country surely has enough weaselling, like the politician going to the press the next day declaring, “That is not what I meant ……” Experts in weaselling always have their escape hatches open and ready.

That is what keeps them going.



J.VASANTHAN


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