WEASEL WORDS

I remember starting to write these thoughts on “Weasel Words” months ago, but the idea sort of got away from me, but when I saw the Health Minister using his “management speak” flummery to try and justify the cancer treatment “postcode lottery”, the train of thought came flooding back, and I found that this song was dancing in my head again, as it once did on a dark morning in the bleak midwinter. The times had moved on, and the mornings had brightened, but the same old faces were spouting the same old bunkum and twaddle, and everything was still the same.

Words are wonderful things, they can make you laugh and dance and sing, share a thought, share a memory, tell someone you care. Of all the things in this big old world we share, I think that it’s an appreciation of word-wrangling that is the thing that makes me the most chuffed. Oh I can be moved to tears or the heights of joy by a piece of music, and I can be massively impressed by a work of art or a performance by an actor that has me transported to a world far beyond myself, a breathtaking view will naturally take my breath away and fill me with awe and wonder at its impressive majesty, yet equally, a tiny bird pecking at some seed in my own front garden will amuse and delight me, or a fine meal will give me pleasure beyond imagining. All these things are part of the magnificence of simply being alive, but it is the well-chosen word, or the beautifully formed phrase, or the story satisfyingly told that still gets to the very emotional heart of being me.

So why these shallow, selfish, mind-numbingly self-interested, career-saving nonentities want to tangle and spin them into such inane banalities in an effort to avoid telling us the fundamental truth that they try so hard to deny is a crime against every one of us, whether we even notice it or not. Most of us lurking in this strange world that I now like to call Blogfordshire have a love of words. We venture into the world of Bloggerage with an intention to seek out and consume the thoughts and words that others choose to put out into the great miasma in an effort to provide some light, some momentary entertainment, or just an attempt, however ham-fisted it may be, to share what they think of as their own sense of what is something resembling rational thought with the world beyond themselves. So many may fail, but they are at least trying to communicate with their fellow human beings. All of us, everyday, to a lesser of greater extent, be it in the factory, the pub, the family home or the internet want to do is share our thoughts and words with our fellow travellers, those who share this mad, sad little planet of ours, as it spins us away to our individual oblivions. An ability to use words is what raises us up above the other animals and gives us thing we like to call civilisation.

Yet, words can also be completely divisive. They can cause fights, feuds, and even wars, just because of a misplaced or word or an ill-thought-out phrase. Somebody says something about someone that gets overheard by someone else and reported back to someone else who takes offence. People have died because of less.

Words on a page can have many interpretations. I may well mean to be saying one thing in a light-hearted and tinkling vein, but you might read those very same words so playfully meant and take umbrage and deep offence and storm off into the farthest corners of cyberspace and never darken this lovingly crafted corner again. Email seems to be one of the worst for this. There’s no nuance in the average email, no subtlety. A “harmless” phrase can turn the recipient into a mass of rage or a quivering wreck if not chosen carefully or sensitively enough.

Context is everything.

Nuance is vital.

Assume that everyone will read between the lines, even if, in the end, they choose not to read all the lines you wrote for them. Be careful what you write, and how you write it. Be careful what you say, and how you say it. I knew someone once who used to say the most terrible things, and for once it actually isn’t me I’m talking about. Such spiteful, horrible, ill-thought-out things would pour out of her, but it didn’t matter because she would notice your frown, and just as your mouth was forming the phrases to admonish her she would swiftly say “Only joking!” as if that absolved every barb and hurt. I still maintain that some of the worst humiliations and crimes committed by one human being upon another have been done in the name of “Having a bit of a laugh…”

“What’s wrong with you? It was only a bit of fun…”

One person’s idea of “a bit of fun” not quite matching up with your own never quite seeming to register with the jolly prankster or the japing jester, as their victims slink away to wash away their tears at the thoughtless words so artfully and heartlessly woven.

But all these small, petty crimes against humanity pale into insignificance against the word-weasel. The perveyor of “spin”, the weaver of lies and half-truths and phrases designed to hide the truth behind a barrier of plausible amiability, designed to wrong-foot us and send us away contented at having been told a lie in such a way as we might even thank them for doing so. It happens all the time when the “sound-bite” is more important than the obvious truth, when the uncomfortable facts need to be hidden behind a barrier of bonhomie, or the question is neatly swerved away from or ignored altogether in favour of staying on message, when the people must be told what you’d prefer them to hear, and what you think they would like to hear rather than that slippery fellow, that we couldn’t possibly be worthy of (in case it sullied your precious career or made us think you unworthy of the high office you are so obviously besmirching), the absolute truth.

This is why we should be very wary of those who use weasel words, those that dress them up in the verbal equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes, or try to hide the cold hard facts behind the razzle-dazzle of the latest manifestation of management-speak in order to cover up their own general inadequacies, or those things in society that are just plain wrong, and the part that they themselves have played in that wrongdoing. So many can, and so many do, try to bamboozle and confuse us into believing what they believe themselves to be the importance of whatever it is that they do, or, more importantly, do not do, and use their weasely, sneaky and squirm-inducing ways to persuade us that it’s not their fault it’s our fault and there was nothing that they could have done and, even though we know that there is everything that they could have done, we still let them get away with it.

Again.

It’s a nice word “weasel” got a good ring to it. Like “tulip” and “elbow” it has the air of  verbal perfection about it. So why it became associated with slyness and wickedness is anyone’s guess. I find them rather fetching creatures to look at, to be perfectly honest. I’m not sure I’d be too grateful if one ran into my house one evening, but, generally, they seem to be fairly aesthetically pleasing little bundles of fur. Maybe it’s Kenneth Grahame’s fault, with his image of all those stoats, ferrets and weasels infesting Toad Hall burning so brightly from our childhood storybook memories. Maybe, back in those darkest days in the battle for survival in the corridors of academia, I did have the air of the weasel about me which is why I feel a slight fondness for them now. Perhaps that is why my English teacher made me Chief Weasel in our schoolroom performances of A.A. Milne’s “Toad of Toad Hall”…

Beware the Weasel words!