Weasel words
Tuppenny rice, rhyming slang and shitgibbons
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel.
Matt Groening (via Homer Simpson)
In some ways, weasels are very impressive animals. Their bite is so powerful that they can crush prey of up to ten times their own weight, a bite force greater than that of a lion, hyena or bear relative to body size. They are also so slender and agile that they can get inside the smallest burrows of the mice and voles that are their main prey. These facts notwithstanding, weasels get a bad press. You can be as sly as a fox, as busy as a bee, or as happy as a clam (those well-known merry molluscs), but you’d be as quarrelsome as a weasel should you wish to reference one of the more obscure animal similes. They are also bloodthirsty hunters who will kill several of their prey – brains and all – before they are sated, a characteristic which might explain why they are often cast as the villains of the piece in books and films. In Kenneth Grahame’s classic story, The Wind in the Willows (1908), a motley band of weasels, stoats and ferrets led by the dastardly Chief Weasel emerge from the Wild Wood and take over Toad Hall, evicting Toad from his property. Once installed, the squatters soon turn Toad Hall into a glamorous tip and spend their time getting drunk, ‘lying in bed half the day, and breakfast at all hours … making bad jokes and singing vulgar songs’ – it sounds idyllic. Weasels are also the baddies in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), where they are the henchmen of Judge Doom in a decidedly gangsterish team of law enforcers named the Toon Patrol. Switchblade-wielding weasels with monikers such as Smartass, Greasy and Psycho spend the film pursuing Roger and Jessica Rabbit before they finally get their comeuppance and literally die laughing.
In the mid-19th century, the emergence of the traditional English song and country dance Pop Goes the Weasel saw the weasel being catapulted into the popular consciousness. It became highly fashionable at the dances of the nobility in the 1850s and was performed at Queen Victoria’s private soirees. This was in spite of the fact that the lyrics seem to reference a very different social demographic. Tuppenny rice sweetened with treacle was eaten by the urban poor and pop is a slang term for ‘pawn’. Weasel in this context may be Cockney rhyming slang for ‘coat’ – i.e., weasel and stoat’, but it is possible that weasel may have started out as whistle, in which case Pop Goes the Whistle would refer to ‘whistle and flute’, aka ‘suit’. Another theory is that the rhyme is about the weavers who worked in Spitalfields in London’s East End. A spinner’s weasel is a mechanical device used to measure yarn. It makes a popping noise when the required amount (usually a skein or eighty yards of yarn), has been measured out. Whatever the origin – and it may just be a nonsense phrase – the attraction of Pop Goes the Weasel soon palled, going from ‘one of the most mirth inspiring dances which can well be imagined’ (1852), to ‘a ditty which has bored everyone to death with its eternal grinding’ (1856) – a sentiment that may resonate with anyone who has a Pop Goes the Weasel earworm due to it being played by ice cream vans every five minutes in the summer.
Weasels were regarded as pests in Ancient Greece and Rome because they nested in houses and stole food. Cultural depictions of weasels also tend to be more negative than positive. For example, in some districts of Greece and Macedonia, weasels were seen as destroyers of clothes. One superstition was that the weasel was the transformation of a bride that would rip other brides’ wedding dresses to pieces out of jealousy. To prevent this, brides-to-be would leave out sweetmeats and honey, known as ‘the necessary spoonfuls’ to appease the embittered weasel. In other districts, women who had headaches after washing their heads in water drawn overnight would attribute their pain to a weasel that had used the water as a mirror, but they would not say the animal's name aloud in case it destroyed their clothes. In China, it is bad luck to kill a weasel because they are believed to be hungry ghosts, wandering spirits which can steal or replace people’s souls.
On the other hand, weasels are cast in a more favourable light in some cultures. The Ancient Macedonians believed that seeing a weasel was a sign of good luck; the Inuit see weasels as very wise and courageous animals – one Inuit hero would transform himself into a weasel whenever he needed to complete a task that required great bravery; and the Ojibwe people of southern Canada and the northern United States also consider weasels to be good omens because they could kill the terrible wendigo, a malevolent spirit or mythological creature from Algonquian folklore that was filled with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. (The wendigo may well have been a dreaded cannibal, but the way that the weasel could kill it was hardly prepossessing either, as it achieved this by rushing up the wendigo’s anus and eating its heart).
Roman polymath, Pliny the Elder, author, military commander, natural philosopher, naturalist and brilliant teller of tall tales admires the fact that weasels chase snakes, blithely asserts that they are poisonous to the asp (they aren’t), and recommends a preparation of crushed weasel as an antidote to asp venom. Asp was used as a catch-all term for assorted venomous snakes in Roman times (including the Egyptian cobra, whose venom was used by Cleopatra to commit suicide, according to Plutarch, Shakespeare and popular legend), but crushed weasel has yet to prove its worth to the snakebitten or the pharmaceutical industry. Pliny also makes the airy claim that the weasel is the only animal that is fatal to the fearsome basilisk, a legendary reptile. His Natural History describes the basilisk as a snake with a crown-shaped crest on its head, which kills people just by looking at them: ‘when it hisses, all the other serpents fly from it: and it does not advance its body, like the others, by a succession of folds, but moves along upright and erect upon the middle. It destroys all shrubs, not only by its contact, but those even that it has breathed upon; it burns up all the grass, too, and breaks the stones, so tremendous is its noxious influence’. The weasel is thrown into the basilisk’s burrow in order to, er, reek havoc. The basilisk cannot withstand its odour and both the basilisk and the weasel die in the ensuing struggle. All of this would make the stench of weasel pretty potent if only the basilisk existed.
Weasels have clearly been thought to be more than a little whiffy for a very long time. Two of Aristophanes’ plays feature characters whose farts ‘stink worse than a weasel’ and even the etymology of weasel suggests that it has long been reputed as being on the pongy side. Old English weosule is a descendant of Proto-Germanic *wisulǭ ‘weasel’, from the Proto-Indo-European root *weys- ‘ooze, stink’. Essentially, weasel means ‘stinking animal’, an indignity it shares with bison, another descendant of *weys- via Proto-Germanic *wisand ‘wild ox, aurochs’, the bison being another famous stinker because of the foul, musky stench it emits in the rutting season.
Weasel words are the bland, hedging, equivocal words beloved by our great leaders, which may look superficially meaningful but are carefully constructed to be ambiguous or non-committal and are principally used to avoid answering a direct question with anything that hints at a pledge to do something difficult. Weasel word is first attested in a short story by Stewart Chaplin called The Stained-Glass Political Platform, which was published in 1900:
Weasel words are words that suck all the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks an egg and leaves the shell. If you heft the egg afterward it's as light as a feather, and not very filling when you're hungry; but a basketful of them would make quite a show, and would bamboozle the unwary.
From weasel words, the verb weasel quickly entered American political slang to mean ‘extricate yourself from a difficult situation’ – particularly apt for those Teflon politicians that dirt never seems to stick to – and soon after began to be used with the sense ‘act in an evasive manner’. This pejorative idea is likely to have spawned the term of abuse cockweasel for someone who takes the credit for your work or effort and who will generally cheat their way to the top, trampling on anyone who gets in their way. I was delighted to discover that cockweasel is an example of a figure of speech which has been the subject of much recent linguistic debate. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the shitgibbon!
A shitgibbon is a type of compound word made up of a single-syllable expletive and an absurd or non-sequitous two-syllable noun consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable – a trochee, if you will. Other examples of shitgibbons that have graced the internet include arsebiscuit, jizztrumpet and cockwomble. You can find others if you want to pollute your browsing history or challenge your company’s profanity filter. Shitgibbon was coined in 1990 by journalist David Quantick in the music magazine NME but really gained prominence on social media in 2016 when Twitter user @MetalOllie came up with a flyting par excellence when he called Donald Trump a ‘tiny-fingered, Cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon’ for wilfully misrepresenting the Brexit vote by tweeting that Scotland ‘took their country back’. (In fact, Scotland voted against leaving the EU by a 62-38% margin.) The following year, Daylin Leech, a Pennsylvania state senator, took up the insult, tweeting that Trump was ‘a fascist, loofa-faced, shit-gibbon’. That’s where weasel words get you!