What is the Opposite of a Weasel Word ?
by Robert Waldmann
What is the Opposite of a Weasel Word ?
I need a metaphor and no one is answering at metaphor customer service.
I need a nuancing partner for weasel word. A weasel word is a qualifier which makes a statement so weak it is unfalsifiable without making it sound like “I don’t know either.” I think there is an equally seriously problem with words used only to set up straw men. There are words which can be used to make a perfectly reasonable claim false.
I am tempted to call them “berserker words” as only the sort of person who would go into battle unarmored would actually use them. On the other hand, berserkers were people and not at all like weasels. I also thought of “rabid lion words” but, come on, syllables. I think “wolverine words” might be good, since wolverines are closely related to weasels (who are ferocious and fearless so whose weaseling whom here ?).
I just read “invariably” in one of the “Five Myths about …” essays (here I think part of the problem is the norm that there have to be five myths — the essayist who can only think of four is strongly tempted to strawmanize). I won’t link to it, because I don’t want to criticize the author.
Also
Necessarily, inevitably, exclusively, absolutely, automatically, [give me a minute I’ll think of more]
I wonder what is the ratio of people saying something is invariably true to people claiming that a (usually un-named, un-cited, and absolutely made up) opponent says it is invariably true.
update: “gospel” is another berserker word
as in “It is taken as virtual gospel among progressives that Democrats once had a lock on white working class voters, but that position quickly eroded in the 1990s and later” Uh Chris I’m a progressive and I sure didn’t have that impression in the 1980s and earlier. Name a progressive preacher of that gospel (it will have to be one of the kids I envy who don’t even remember Reagan)
lifted from <a href=”http://rjwaldmann.blogspot.com/“>Stochastic Thoughts</a>
“…. there is an equally seriously problem with words used only to set up straw men. ”
The Straw Man was in the Wizard of Oz , so you could go with “wizzer words”.
Or , when you use a straw , you suck , so maybe sucko , sucky , …?
hedgehog comes to mind as possibly having a double entendre
Can you give another couple of examples? I’m not quite sure what we are describing here.
“Marmot words”! Weasely, yet much more soft and cuddly or Ferret like.
Sadly, I think the word YOU are looking for is that old saw “bullshit”, pure and simple. Plowing through every argument, much like the “Bull” it came out of AND it has the advantage of following the herd.
Nah, there are too many varieties of BS, what’s wanted is a specific kind of word. Luckily, a modern master of political and social dynamics has got there ahead of us, as he always seems to do.
Terry Pratchett has spoken about this sort of word, and named it. The specific example he uses is “clearly.” “Aha,” thought William, “that’s a wallpaper word. When people say ‘clearly’ something, that means there’s huge crack in their argument and they know things aren’t clear at all.”
This is from “The Truth,” about a third of the way through, where the zombie lawyer Mr. Slant is offering as valid a guild charter not yet signed into law by the Patrician, who is in jail accused of murder. Is it or is it not not valid? Slant says, “Clearly, we cannot get a signature from a man in prison on a very serious charge.”
So, there’s your word, or at least one good try at it. Like new wallpaper in a house with its plaster all cracked, it is there to make the faulty look flawless.
Noni
Noni Mausa: Good one! I bow to YOU.
False qualifier
I am still not quite clear on where Robert was heading with this but let me put forth “sensible” as in “sensible centrist”.
Because all “sensible” means in political discourse is that a proposition makes ‘obvious’ (another one) ‘sense’ to a man of sense while implicitly relegating all contrary propositions to the realm of ‘nonsense’. And obviously you can’t refute ‘nonsense’ and it is a waste of time to try, why you might as well just try to argue a ‘hysterical’ woman out of her hysteria when as we all now her ‘hyster’ is (umm) ‘hysterically’ jumping around inside. (And of course hysteria is simply a physical manfestation of improperly functioning lady parts. That is why men of sense don’t need to pay attention.)
‘Real’ men are ‘sensible’, because their thinking is commonsensical and makes perfect sense to other men of sense. That is other real men. And if you disagree you are just spouting nonsense and often enough hysterical nonsense just like a woman. Or what is worse a liberal.
It is this circular utilizaton of ‘sensible’ that unites such paragons of Conservative thought as ‘Doughy Pantload’ Jonah Goldberg, the Mustache of Understanding Tom Friedman, a certain David Brooks and last but not to be forgotten Andrew Sullivan. “I mean man (and I do mean ‘man’) you just got to sit down and think these things through in a sensible way just like those past men of sense like Burke and Madison and OF COURSE it makes sense, how could it not?”
If you had to find an animal exemplar it might be the Owl. Who is reputed to be wise because he sits so placidly in daylight blinking his eyes while rapt up in deep thought, offering only the occassional wise Socratic ‘Who?’ Which in most cases is, you must admit, a very sensible questoin. The fact that Mr. Owl is actually sitting there blinking is because he is blinded by the light and if thinking anything is pondering how good that rodent will taste once the blasted sun goes down and lets him see.
But he sure looks wise. And sounds it too. James Thurber had a wonderful story about this back in the day “The Owl Who Was God”
http://www.k-state.edu/english/baker/english320/Thurber-The_Owl_Who_Was_God.htm
(BTW this is probably under copyright in the U.S. (though apparently not in Canada) and it is up to you to see if you think reading it is “Fair Use”. But shoot it is only three paragraphs long. And you can always blame me)
Another one from history is that of the “pre-mature anti-Fascist”
That is Good Communists were steadfastly anti-Fascist and pro-intervention against Franco and then Mussolini and Hitler until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement at which time they were against any such thing. But then Hitler (amazingly) stabbed them in the back by actually invading Russia and then they were all anti-Fascist/get America into the War again. But those liberals like FDR who were for intervention all along had to be wrong before they were right and so was born the term ‘pre-mature anti-Fascist’.
Something us ‘DFH’s’ who were against Iraq not because we loved Saddam but because history taught us that the outcome was going to be really, really ugly and just get thousands of Americans and Brits killed and tens of thousands of Iraqis and end up in a Forever War of Sunnis against Shi’ia understand full well. Sure we turned out to be right. But we were wrong to be right before it was sensible to be right.
Obviously. That only makes sense. To sensible men of sense. Like the Mustache of Understanding and Bobo Brooks. Why you could ask them!!!
Oh and ‘berserkers’ were not ‘people’, at least not exactly.
Berserkers rest right on the very blurry boundary between Scandinavian/Viking history and myth and square in the saga tradition that incorporates both. There seems to me no question that among a people who really and truly believed in trolls and elves that the idea that a warrior could partially transform into an honest to God bear (the ‘ber” in ‘berserk’) in exactly the same way as Beorn does in the Hobbit was not in that sense metaphoric at all.
I read a huge amount of Icelandic Saga back in my grad school days (in translation) and taken as a group they move right from the wholly mythical to the mostly entirely historical with some of the most famous striding boldly back and forth. That is we are not compelled to take the strictly rationalistic approach of say the Wiki article, the composers of the Sagas and their latter transcriptors were not writing academic history, a discipline and a style of analysis still hundreds of years in the future.
Bruce: “sensible,” yes!
May I recommend a book on philology called “Plastic Words,” by the German professor Uwe Poerkson. http://www.amazon.ca/Plastic-Words-Tyranny-Modular-Language/dp/0271024925 scroll down for a useful review of this book.
His words are not quite like “wallpaper words,” but they can be used for similar, oft nefarious purposes. From that review:
“…As a reporter, I have gone to countless “professional development” conferences. And I have read too many government and business documents for my own good. What Poerksen says about the state of languages in this time is true.
What does he say? The core is that words like “process”, “development”, “system”, “information”, and “communication” are now often used without real meaning, without substance, but nonetheless to lay claim to authority—the authority of science and expertise, the appearance of competence. Discourse of this kind prevails in large and important spheres of human activity.
“Amoeba words” or “plastic words” begin in the speech that we all speak to each other, in “the vernacular”, a language full of metaphor.
Plastic words are extremely general. Vernacular words can be very general, too, but that is because they are flexible and nuanced; they embrace many associated senses—Poerksen gives “love” as an example-and take on specific meaning and colour from a particular context.
Scientists draw on the vernacular for their technical terms, for their legitimate jargon. They give or try to give them precision, independent of context. Often, abstractions have metaphors in their pedigrees.
In the late twentieth century, some scientific terms have come back into the vernacular, still clothed with the prestige of science. They have lost their exactitude, without regaining colour, tone, voice, and the accompaniment of gestures: their life in context. Poerksen’s definition is that they are “connotative stereotypes”: they have associations, they connote, but they do not designate anything specific. They are like the waves that result from a stone being thrown into water, if there could be such waves without a central point of impact, without a stone.
Poerksen wanted to call the book Lego Language, but the publisher was afraid this would be a trademark violation. The point is that these words are like “modules” that can be almost arbitrarily stuck together, so independent are they of context:
“Information is communication. Communication is exchange. Exchange is a relationship. A relationship is a process. Process means development. Development is a basic need. Basic needs are resources. Resources are a problem. Problems require service delivery. Service delivery systems are role systems. Role systems are partnership systems. Partnership systems require communication. Communication is a kind of energy exchange…”
Once you are alert, you hear these words everywhere.
Noni
If I understand correctly, you could think about adding words and phrases like: entirely, no one would or does, everyone would or does, universally, required (requires), naturally (follows naturally), assuredly, undoubtedly, without question, inevitably, in every instance, without exception,
After reading this: ““wolverine words” might be good, since wolverines are closely related to weasels (who are ferocious and fearless so whose weaseling whom here ?). ”
Honey Bear, a weasel, came to mind as he does not give a shit.
Decades ago, I was writing about how absolute words, like always, never, all, every and so on, were indications that your argument should be examined. Either you were making an assumption about the real world that should be examined (“all crows are black”) or else your use of the absolute was definitional — you were declaring the word “crow” only applied to black birds, or “sensible” applied to certain doctrinal policies, regardless of outcomes. Whoever defines the terms of discourse can set themselves up as winners before the contest even begins.
So, one side of rhetoric is weaselling — structuring your statements so they mean nothing. The other is bullying, in the mode of Humpty Dumpty, who made words do what he wanted despite their common usage. In both cases, the goal is not communication, but manipulating the discussion to the detriment of any fair dealers who might not notice what has been done.
Noni
Our language and our ability to utilize language is too comprehensive to allow a word or short phrase that describes the misuse of language in order to subvert the meaning of its use in any instance. I was reading an article in The Atlantic concerning Asperger’s Syndrom having been removed from the DSM, and containing interesting quotes from well published diagnosed persons. The relevant point here is that one such quote from Daniel Tammet, discussing how as a child he would model his mother’s behavior in order to be able to predict what she might do in any specific situation, describes the weaselly nature and potential error of such modeling. “I slowly came to understand how limited and clumsy an approximation was my model of her, how many variables I had not accounted for (whose existence I had not even guessed), and how large and liberating a role chance played in all our affairs.” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/03/letting-go-of-aspergers/357563/
How interesting is this? CJR, this afternoon, put up an article concerning the use of weasel sentences. They don’t use the word weasel, but they focus on the same phenomenon. To wit, “Sentences that mislead readers are called “garden path” sentences, because they take readers in unexpected directions, the way someone who has been “led down the garden path” has been misled.” http://www.cjr.org/language_corner/language_corner_022414.php
Too bad CJR is not a primary source for news, but, instead, discusses the failures and occasional accomplishments of the news media.
Sam’s got it. I guess I should just call them “straw man words.” The idea is that they are words which are almost always put into the mouths of made up intellectual adversaries. It is easy to argue that something shouldn’t be reflexively automatically assumed to be absolutely unquestionably certainly gospel. It is easy to make up a straw man whose straw knees jerk as he insists that everyone who isn’t a fool and a knave must instantly see that there absolutely no merit whatsoever to my argument. It’s a lot easier than coming up with an argument with merit.
I can’t believe that no one in this thread has quoted from “Politics and the English Language.” Please don’t tell me that the Octopus of Orwellism has sung its swan song.
I want to combine a comment by Bruce and one by Noni to suggest that “plastic words” should be called “owl words.” “Lego language” is called “boilerplate” since boiler plates are pre-made then bolted together