The Australian Policy magazine’s The ‘We’ Word: And the Tyranny of the Majority comes with the following subtitle:
False collectives — what Americans call ‘weasel words’ — poison the language we use to talk about public affairs by cobbling together spurious majorities, writes Roger Kerr.
Perhaps that sounds perfectly reasonable to an Australian audience. Weasel words? It turns out that the article is quoting Hayek, an Austrian, describing how a word like “social” can be “applied indiscriminately to a huge number of nouns in a way that undermines their original meanings and recruits them into a collectivist cause”:
. . . it has in fact become the most harmful instance of what, after Shakespeare’s ‘I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs’ (As You Like It, II, 5), some Americans call a ‘weasel word’. As a weasel is alleged to be able to empty an egg without leaving a visible sign, so can these words deprive of content any term to which they are prefixed while seemingly leaving them untouched. A weasel word is used to draw the teeth from a concept one is obliged to employ, but from which one wishes to eliminate all implications that challenge one’s ideological premises.