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November 8th, 2026 (Permalink)

Weasel Words Suck Eggs

In the first installment of this series1, I mentioned that Theodore Roosevelt popularized the phrase "weasel words", but that Stewart Chaplin inspired him. Here's a relevant excerpt from a short story published by Chaplin in which two characters are discussing a proposed political party platform:

"This is supposed to be the platform of a party that has made a lot of horrible mistakes, broken all its pledges, has the country down on it, and sees certain defeat staring it in the face. … And like most platforms, …it contains plenty of what I call weasel words."

"And what may weasel words be?"

"Why, 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."

"I know them well…and mighty useful they are, too. Although the old gentleman couldn't write much of a platform, he's an expert on weaseling. I've seen him take his pen, and go through a proposed plank or resolution, and weasel every flat-footed word in it. Then the weasel word pleases one man, and the word that's been weaseled pleases another."2

Given that Theodore Roosevelt credited Chaplin with the phrase, together with the fact that TR first used it in criticizing political platforms, it's clear that Chaplin's story was his source. However, Chaplin himself did not claim to have created it, so it's possible that he picked up the phrase somewhere and used it without giving credit, though it appears that his story was its first appearance in print.

So, what is a weasel word (WW)? According to Chaplin, a WW is an individual word that sucks all the meaning―"life"―out of a neighboring word leaving it meaningless, like a weasel sucks the contents out of an egg leaving an empty shell. Like an Easter egg, it may look pretty but there's nothing to eat inside. This is a colorful metaphor, but it's not a definition. In place of a definition, we can look for examples to clarify the phrase's meaning.

Chaplin wrote this in a fictional story about politics, so the context indicates he was primarily thinking of empty political verbiage, such as that often found in party platforms. Unfortunately, he only gave one specific example of a WW, which occurs in the following passage describing a plank in the platform:

"'… Recognizing the evils of intemperance, we approve of all well-considered efforts to abate and remove its dire consequences. The public should be protected―'"

"'Duly protected,'…That's always a good weasel word."

"Yes. 'Duly protected. The freedom of the individual should not be restricted.'"

"Should not be unduly restricted….'"3

According to Chaplin, "duly" is a WW, therefore, when it modifies "protected" it sucks all the meaning out of it. This must be because public demands to be protected from the evils of intemperance may be rejected as asking for undue protection, and the politicians get to decide what protections are due the public.

Though Chaplin doesn't say so explicitly, "unduly" is presumably also a WW for the same reasons as "duly", and particular restrictions can always be defended as not unduly restricting freedom. Again, it's the politicians who decide which restrictions do not restrict freedom unduly.

Unfortunately, Chaplin does not give an explicit definition of "weasel word", but only a colorful metaphor involving empty eggs, and provides only two examples, which isn't much to go on. Perhaps we shouldn't expect more from a short work of fiction. However, WWs appear to be what others have called "hedges" or "guarding phrases"4. These are words or phrases intended to hedge statements about and guard them from attack. The way that a hedge protects a claim is by weakening it so that it is harder to refute.

Working from Chaplin's two examples, there are other words that we can infer will play the role of weasels. "Duly" and "unduly" are adverbs, but the related adjectives "due" and "undue" can also be used as WWs. So, instead of saying "the public should be duly protected", we could say "the public should receive all due protection". Then, there are synonyms, such as "appropriate" and "inappropriate", and their adverbial forms, so that we could say "the public should be appropriately protected".

Chaplin's example, "the freedom of the individual should not be restricted" makes an overly-strong claim, since we want to restrict the freedom of individuals to murder, rape, or rob. By adding the hedge "unduly" to "restricted", we can weaken the claim, making it harder to criticize. However, using too many weakening expressions can leave statements so weak that there's nothing much left. For instance, a statement such as "the appropriate freedom of deserving individuals should not be unduly restricted without due process" has been so weakened that it has been emptied of meaning, and a political platform containing it has committed itself to nothing.

Hedging words and phrases can serve a useful purpose and should not be condemned wholesale, not even "duly" and "unduly". Despite what Chaplin says, the problem is not so much with the words themselves but with how they are used. Hedges allow us to weaken claims so that we're not overstating, but should not be used to weaken a claim so much that it loses meaning.

What words and phrases other than the two that Chaplin gave, together with synonyms, can be used as WWs? Coincidentally, I recently received in the mail a letter that reminded me of one of my favorites. The letter was an offer to buy my house for an amount so large that it got my attention, despite the fact that I currently have no desire to sell. The amount seemingly offered was surely far more than the house is actually worth, yet at the bottom of the letter was a "check" made out to me that, at first glance, appeared to be genuine. However, a closer examination revealed the following words in fine print at the bottom of the "check":

DISCLAIMER: This is not a real check. To receive your real cash offer, call [phone number redacted] today!5

In addition, on the realistic-looking "check", before the line in which the sum was written, were the words: "PAY UP TO:". So the company that sent me the letter was not actually offering me the large amount printed on the fake check, but a sum "up to" that amount. In other words, the sum on the check was really a maximum offer, and the real offer could be any amount less, including $0.

The phrase "up to" is, thus, a weasel phrase, since it doesn't commit the user to any actual sum; it commits the user only to not exceed the amount mentioned. In the case of the offer for my house, the amount on the check was so much beyond the house's value that there was no danger of an actual offer exceeding it. So, the supposed offer was completely empty, but it got my attention, which is what it was intended to do.

There are surely other words and phrases that can be used to weasel words, in Chaplin's sense, but I'll leave discovering them as an exercise for the reader. In the next installment of this series, I intend to look at Teddy Roosevelt's contribution.

Notes:

  1. ↑ Weasel Words Ripped My Flesh, 10/29/2026.
  2. ↑ Stewart Chaplin, "The Stained-Glass Political Platform", The Century Magazine, 6/1900, p. 305. Paragraphing suppressed.
  3. ↑ Ibid., p. 306.
  4. ↑ Robert J. Fogelin & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic (4th edition, 1991), pp. 42f.
  5. ↑ Personal mail, dated: 11/2/2026; received: 11/6/2026.
November 6th, 2026 (Permalink)

Outsmarting an Economist

Consider the following quote from a book I've been reading:

…[W]e're…given the…information that when he's poorer, he eats fewer kidneys. (Actually we're told that when he's richer, he eats more kidneys, but that comes down to the same thing.)1

Does it actually come down to the same thing? No, you might just as well say that when he's growing, he's getting older comes down to the same thing as when he's not growing, he's getting younger. To return to the example, it might be that he likes kidneys so much that losing money has no effect on his kidney-eating―maybe he cuts back on liver so that he can afford them. Alternatively, when he gets poorer he might even increase his kidney consumption to console himself over his loss of wealth. We need more context to determine what effect decreasing wealth might have on his diet.

This is an example of an improper transposition2, that is, treating a statement of the form When A then B as logically equivalent to the statement When not A then not B.

Now, if his getting richer varies directly with the amount of kidneys he eats3, then what the quote says would be true. I suspect that this may have been what the author was thinking when he wrote the above passage, but what it says is logically weaker.

By the way, despite the above error, the book has been very interesting so far.

Notes:

  1. ↑ Steven E. Landsburg, Can You Outsmart an Economist? (2018), p. 56. Who "he" refers to here is not relevant to the logical point, but it's not Hannibal Lector.
  2. ↑ Improper Transposition.
  3. ↑ Bryan Bunch & Jenny Tesar, The Penguin Desk Dictionary of Science and Mathematics (2000), under "direct variation".
October 31st, 2026 (Permalink)

A Headline for Hallowe'en

New Genus of Nightmare Spaghetti Worms Found Deep Under the Indian Ocean*

Creepy pasta?

*Michelle Starr, "New Genus of Nightmare Spaghetti Worms Found Deep Under The Indian Ocean", Science Alert, 10/18/2026

October 29th, 2026 (Permalink)

Weasel Words Ripped My Flesh

What are weasel words? First things first: what is a weasel? A weasel is a type of carnivorous mammal, related to ferrets and polecats. Weasels are long and thin with short legs, and so able to hunt animals such as rabbits and voles in their burrows1.

Weasels have a bad reputation, presumably because they will eat chickens if they can catch them, which has led farmers to consider them pests. Given their lithe physiques, weasels are difficult to capture or keep out of places such as hen houses, because they can squeeze through small openings.

Some myths have sprung up about weasels: one is that they are the only animal, other than human beings, to kill for sport. This myth comes from the habit of weasels killing every chicken in a hen house, but they are one of the few carnivores, other than humans, to store meat for later consumption. So, weasels don't kill for sport but to stock the larder.

In addition to chickens, weasels also will eat their eggs, which has led to a myth that is relevant to the phrase "weasel words", namely, that a weasel will bite a small hole in an egg and suck out its contents, leaving an intact but empty egg. The myth goes back at least to Shakespeare, who alludes to the legend in two plays2. This seems to be an "old wives' tale" since weasels will indeed eat eggs, but they don't suck them3.

What do weasels have to do with words? If you're like me, you'll suspect that the phrase "weasel words" comes from the slang use of the word "weasel" for a type of person, with "weasel words" referring to the kind of words used by such a person. However, the phrase "weasel words" seems to have arisen independently of the slang sense of "weasel" to refer to an insidious, cunning, and dishonest person, though no doubt such human weasels do indeed use weasel words. Instead, as we shall see, the phrase "weasel words" came from the legend that weasels suck eggs.

Weasel words are sometimes equated with doublespeak, or considered a type of doublespeak4. The concept of doublespeak originated last century as a result of the totalitarianism of both left and right that spread over much of the globe. It was not that language had never been perverted for political reasons previously―for instance, the Greek historian Thucydides had written about the way words changed their meanings during the Peloponnesian War5. While there had been dictatorships as long as there had been governments, totalitarianism was something new: a government that sought total control over its citizens' lives including education, communication, and language itself6.

While totalitarianism came into existence before the end of the first world war, at about the same time as the phrase "weasel words" was coined, the word "doublespeak" came later. However, both were born in a non-totalitarian, democratic nation, namely, the United States of America, which is not surprising given that totalitarian states do not allow criticism. I'm not sure who coined the word "doublespeak", but it was popularized by the linguist William Lutz in a series of books published in the 1980s and '90s7.

"Doublespeak" appears to be a portmanteau word created by combining "doublethink" with "Newspeak", both of which were coined by George Orwell in his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four8. So, "doublespeak" itself must have been coined sometime after Orwell's novel was published, and the earliest published occurrences of the word that I've been able to locate were in the 1970s9.

Theodore Roosevelt has been credited with the phrase "weasel words"10 but, as we will see, he just popularized it. Instead, Stewart Chaplin may have coined the phrase11. "Who is Stewart Chaplin?" you might ask, which is why Teddy gets the credit. In any case, the use of "weasel words" for weaselly language appears to have originated early in the previous century.

I'll examine the convoluted history of "weasel words" in the next entry in this series. Stay tuned.

Notes:

  1. ↑ "Weasel", Britannica, 10/10/2026.
  2. ↑ As You Like It, 2:5 & Henry V, 1:2.
  3. ↑ "Weasels", Genuine Mustelids, 9/27/2026.
  4. ↑ William Lutz seems to consider weasel words a type of doublespeak in his seminal book Doublespeak (1989), pp. 85-99 & 102.
  5. ↑ Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book III, Ch. X.
  6. ↑ "Totalitarianism", Britannica, accessed: 10/28/2026.
  7. ↑ William Lutz, Doublespeak (1989), The New Doublespeak (1996) & Doublespeak Defined (1999).
  8. ↑ George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), See ch. 3 for "doublethink" and the Appendix, "The Principles of Newspeak".
  9. ↑ "Doublespeak" was probably also influenced by the pre-existing word or phrase "double-talk", meaning equivocal fast talk or intentionally amusing gibberish.
  10. ↑ John Ciardi, A Second Browser's Dictionary (1981), under "weasel". Ciardi does not himself attribute it to TR, but mentions that a revised edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable did. My edition of Brewer's―the Centenary Edition, Revised―gets it right.
  11. ↑ Stewart Chaplin, "The Stained-Glass Political Platform", The Century Magazine, 1912, p. 305.
October 23rd, 2026 (Updated: 10/25/2026) (Permalink)

More Fake Polls

Just two months ago, there was an unprecedented case of a "pollster" who faked polls1. The fake pollster in question claimed that the hoax was a "social experiment" intended to show how polling misinformation can spread without independent verification―it certainly showed that it can spread a little, but its spread was soon halted and the polls exposed as hoaxes. This was a heartening result.

Now, another "pollster" has revealed that it also faked recent polling results, giving the same excuse for doing so as in the previous case. This one was called "Wedgewood Polls" (WP) and it seems to have had more success at fooling people than the previous one, Median Strategies (MS), which turned out to be just one 21-year-old recent college graduate with no obvious polling background. MS produced just three fake polls whereas WP seems to have put out seventeen2.

In the case of MS, I could find only one minor California publication that reported one of its fake polls. WP, in contrast, took in several major publications, including Newsweek, which had to retract three articles and correct additional ones3. This is discouraging news.

In addition to news sites, several polling aggregators―outfits that average multiple poll results―included WP's fake polls, thus skewing their averages. As far as I know, no aggregator included MS' results in its averages. I've recommended polling aggregators in the past4, because averaging can mitigate against the biases of individual pollsters and the occasional outlier result. I still do recommend them, but they obviously need to be more vigilant before adding the results of new pollsters to their averages and, after this debacle, I expect they will be.

I don't know how much WP's fake polls affected the aggregators' results, or the general perception of the candidates' popularity, but at least one candidate has claimed that one of WP's fake polls sabotaged her campaign. In the case of MS, I speculated that the motive behind the so-called social experiment might have been to create a bandwagon effect5. Given that two out of three of its fake results heavily favored Democrats―I haven't been able to find out about the third one―they look like an attempt at a bandwagon for the Democratic candidates. If it were actually a "social experiment", one would expect the results to split evenly between the two major parties; when all or most of the phony polls favor one party, and that heavily, that's a strong reason to suspect an intentional effort to affect public opinion.

Similarly, WP's faked results seem to have been calculated to promote Democratic candidates. Left-leaning news site Slate6 writes:

Over the past few months, an upstart political polling firm kept delivering good news for Democrats―and especially those on the left. Across more than a dozen surveys, it found progressives leading in key primary races and showed other Democrats in striking distance of winning traditionally Republican states. … Wedgewood claims its deception "was never intended to sway an election or permanently mislead the public," but it may also have wanted to make certain Democrats look more electable….7

In both these cases, the pseudo-pollsters were facing imminent exposure when they 'fessed up, which looks like they got caught trying to influence elections with bogus polling results and then gave the "experiment" excuse.

If this trend of hoaxed polls continues, just imagine what the polling leading up to the general election is going to be like two years from now. Polling is already in disrepute and the last thing its reputation needs is a spate of fake polls. If there's just one more polling hoax this year I'm going to decide, in accordance with Goldfinger's Principle8, that it's enemy action.

Update, 10/25/2026: That was fast! The polling outfit SoCal Strategies (SS) has disappeared in much the same way as Median Strategies and Wedgewood Polls before it9: its website now returns a 404 error page, and its social media presence seems also to have been removed. So, it must have been engaged in some kind of shenanigans―why else suddenly disappear? However, as I write, we don't know exactly what kind of mischief it was up to.

As in the case of the previous two polling "firms", SS was under recent scrutiny due to some dubious polls when it decided to do a bunk, which is as much as an admission that something was wrong with those polls. In contrast with MS and WP, both of which were new outfits, SS was a comparative veteran. Both MS and WP started up in the middle of this year, whereas SS had been polling since at least 2024, and may have been a reputable pollster at that time.

Strangely, SS shut down in May of this year, but then continued to release three supposed polls, so it was a zombie pollster. It was these polls that were suspicious enough to inspire the inquiry that led it to turn off the lights, lock the doors, and flee without leaving a forwarding address.10

We've seen that the faked polls put out by both MS and WP favored Democratic candidates, sometimes heavily; what about the three "polls" put out by SS since its closure in May? The first of these, dealing with the Michigan senate race, was released at the end of July and showed Democratic candidate Haley Stevens two percentage points ahead of Republican Mike Rogers11. Real Clear Polling's (RCP) average currently has Stevens ahead by only 1.7 percentage points12, so SS' result was right on the money.

The remaining two "polls" were released in mid-September and both concerned the state of Texas. In the state's senate race, SS showed the Democratic candidate, James Talarico, five percentage points ahead of the Republican, Ken Paxton. RCP's average for the same date had Talarico ahead by only 2.7 percentage points, so SS' result was on the high side but not unreasonably so13. Finally, in the Governor's race, SS had the Republican candidate ahead by eight points, while RCP's average leans in the same direction by only 3.4 points. Again, a little extreme but in the right direction14.

A person connected to WP was a former employee of SS, so at least those two "pollsters" were related to each other. It's hard to believe that it's just a coincidence that three different outfits have disappeared within a couple of months of each other. In accordance with Goldfinger's Principle, my working hypothesis is that these three "pollsters" were connected and probably working in concert to move the polling aggregators' averages, either to create a bandwagon effect or to make money in the prediction markets.

Just as the "social experiment" explanation doesn't explain why the thumbs of MS and WP were on the scale of the Democrats, neither does the hypothesis that they were trying to manipulate prediction markets, since they could do so just as well by putting their thumbs on the other scale. So, those results favor the bandwagon hypothesis. However, at this point, we don't know exactly what was wrong with SS' polls, and the results don't support either hypothesis, since they were neither skewed towards one party, nor skewed heavily enough to have influenced the markets.

This is now clearly a crisis for the polling industry, and all of the polls for the upcoming midterm election need to be taken with a shaker of salt. Given what's happened in the last couple of months, who knows whether other polls and pollsters will turn out to be fakes? The legitimate polling organizations―if there are any left―need to start an emergency investigation and clean house if they want to restore confidence in their industry.

Notes:

  1. ↑ Straw Polls, 8/21/2026.
  2. ↑ Natalie Jackson, "Fake polls, real polls, and the state of the industry", Stuck in the Middle, 10/22/2026.
  3. ↑ The Editors, "Fake Polling Firm Duped Media in 'Social Experiment'", Newsweek, 10/21/2026.
  4. ↑ How to Read a Poll: Polling the Polls, 10/28/2024.
  5. ↑ Walter Veit, "What Is the Bandwagon Effect?", Psychology Today, 3/14/2020.
  6. ↑ "Slate―Bias and Credibility", Media Bias/Fact Check, 12/20/2024.
  7. ↑ Ian Prasad Philbrick, "There's a 100 Percent Chance These Polls Are Fake", Slate, 10/22/2026.
  8. ↑ Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but the third time it's enemy action. See: Ian Fleming, Goldfinger (1959), epigraph.
  9. ↑ Natalia Mittelstadt, "Polling firm disappears amid media questioning surveys, employees", Fox 11 News, 10/22/2026.
  10. ↑ Zachary Leeman, "Polling Company Goes Dark as Investigative Report Suggests They're Yet Another Fake", Mediaite, 10/22/2026.
  11. ↑ "SoCal Strategies", Polling Source, accessed: 10/25/2026.
  12. ↑ "2026 Michigan Senate―Rogers vs. Stevens", Real Clear Polling, accessed: 10/25/2026.
  13. ↑ "2026 Texas Senate―Paxton vs. Talarico", Real Clear Polling, accessed: 10/25/2026.
  14. ↑ "2026 Texas Governor―Abbott vs. Hinojosa", Real Clear Polling, accessed: 10/25/2026.
Spinner
October 21st, 2026 (Permalink)

There's a Sucker Born Every Second1

On a cool autumn day, Montgomery Banks2 was back at the carnival, and this time he had a spinner on top of his counter. The circular face of the spinner was divided into two sections, as shown: a large red section, making up three-fourths of the spinner's face, and a small green section accounting for the remaining one-fourth of the face. Attached to the center of the spinner was a rotating pointer.

"Step right up, sir or madam, as the case may be," he said to the crowd strolling past his booth, "and take it for a spin. Looky here, this spinner is completely fair and you can even spin it yourself. If you do and the arrow stops on the green section, you win a dollar; if it stops on the red section, you lose a dollar.

"Now, I know what you're thinking. There's only a one-quarter chance of you winning a spin, which means there's a three-quarter chance of losing, but I'm offering you an even-money bet. That ain't a fair bet, is it? No, sir.

"I tell you what I'm gonna do: If you don't win on the first spin, I'll let you try again, and if it stops in the green the second time, you win a buck. That's right, a second spin at no additional charge! That's two spins for a buck, and if you get in the green on either spin, you win. Two times one-quarter is one-half, so that's a fair bet, ain't it?"

Is the bet that Monty's offering fair at even money? Would you be a "sucker" to take the bet?

Extra Credit: If the bet is not fair, what is the real probability that the player will win?

Notes:

  1. ↑ They used to say "There's a sucker born every minute", but since then there's been sucker inflation. The original quote is routinely attributed―to paraphrase Ralph Keyes―to P. T. Barnum, though he probably didn't say it; see: Keyes, The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (2006), p. 215.
  2. ↑ In case you don't know Monty, he is a trickster who always speaks the truth and nothing but the truth, but he seldom speaks the whole truth. Also, he never uses sleight-of-hand or gimmicks of any kind. For previous puzzles involving Monty, see:
Puzzle
September 30th, 2026 (Permalink)

Pop Quiz

Assuming that the following statements are either true of false, which if any are true?

  1. All of the statements below are true.
  2. None of the statements below is true.
  3. All of the statements above are true.
  4. Only one of the statements above is true.
  5. None of the statements above is true.
  6. None of the statements above is true.

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