Weasel words and fishy fudging
Meaning and writerly obligations in a post-truth world
It seems to me that weasels get a bad press. I mean, OK, if you’ve got hens, and a weasel bunks off with the eggs you were relying on for eating or income, then that’d be very annoying. But it wouldn’t be dishonest. They’re just doing what they’ve been brought up to do. So why ‘weasel words’? As far as I can find out, the saying dates back to the turn of the twentieth century, when the analogy was made between a weasel sucking the contents out of an egg, and a speaker sucking the meaning out of a word. Apparently, the expression first appeared in print in Stewart Chaplin's short story "Stained Glass Political Platform" (published 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”.
Not an uncommon state of affairs in all kinds of discourse in which the speaker or writer wishes to avoid making any sort of declaration or statement to which they could be held to account further down the track. And, of course, if you come across weasel words, you can be sure there’s some fishy fudging going on. Not a reflection on fish in themselves, of course, but an indication that there is something as distasteful as the smell of rotting fish somewhere hidden from view.
But can we see when someone sucks the meaning out of words, or sniff out fishy behaviour in a post-truth world, a world in which I have ‘my truth’ and you have ‘your truth’, and everything is relative? As a writer, whose daily tools are words and their meanings, I have to believe we can. Perhaps it is, as Julian Baggini has said, that truth and meaning now appear to us more complex than they did to, say, Aristotle, who roundly declared, “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false; while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.”
As Baggini goes on to say, in an article on his book A Short History of Truth (Quercus, 2017), “Truth has become much less plain and simple, but I see no evidence that most people have ceased to believe in it. People remain as outraged by lies as they ever have done.
That’s why talk of a “post-truth” society is misguided. We wouldn’t even be talking about post-truth if we didn’t think truth mattered. The world is neither ready nor willing to say goodbye to truth, even in politics, where it sometimes seems as though it has already taken its leave.
The antidote is not a return to the comfort of simple truths.To rebuild belief in the power and value of truth, we can’t dodge its complexity. Truths can be and often are difficult to understand, discover, explain, verify. They are also disturbingly easy to hide, distort, abuse or twist. Often we cannot claim with any certainty to know the truth. We need to take stock of the various kinds of real and supposed truths out there and understand how to test their authenticity.
At the risk of sounding a touch militant, I would say that such an endeavour is the particular task of writers - to search for and articulate meaning, and to hold to account those who seek to distort and destroy it. How we do that will be different for each of us, but that we should do it seems to me imperative.
Yes indeed and thank goodness for all those great, conscientious journalists out there ...