WICKED WORD-The battle of bologna

By V.S. Jayaschandran

Dementors in Harry Potter suck the soul out of people. Ron Weasley is terrified of them. Weasel words in English act like Dementors. They suck the life out of sentences, like the weasel sucking the yolk out of an egg without breaking the shell.

Weasel words are misleading or evasive words. “Interestingly” at the beginning of a sentence can be a weasel word. What follows often is uninteresting. “Downsizing” is another kind of weasel word, a favourite of management morons. It bandages the wounds of job loss and masks the pain. “Collateral damage” was a more cruel one. For the Iraqi people, it was nothing short of genocide.

in a short story he wrote in An obscure writer, Stewart Chaplin, coined the term weasel wordsThe Century Magazine in 1900. Theodore Roosevelt stole it a decade later to slam Woodrow Wilson’s writings. When accused of plagiarism, Roosevelt said he had learnt the term from a hunting guide years before Chaplin wrote the short story. Erudite hunting guides must be a species unique to America.

Union Minister Krishna Tirath weaseled out of a tight spot after printing a wrong photograph in a newspaper ad against female foeticide. The goof-up elevated a former Pakistani air chief marshal to an Indian icon. But Tirath quibbled that the “message is more important than the image”. Quibbling is a common definition of weasel words.

The goof-up gave the ad an extended life in the media. It would have got more attention if the ministry had emulated the Canadian newspaper Peterborough Examiner. The paper recently published a photograph of students at a Santa Claus parade. It showed a hunk of a boy from St Peter’s School, surrounded by buxom girls, exulting with his arms up in the air and his peter peeking out of his shorts. The editors noticed the quiet intruder only the morning after.

Mountweazel is no sexually active weasel. The New Yorker magazine found the profile of a Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of The New Columbia Encyclopedia in 2005. It said she was a designer and photographer who was born in 1942 and killed at age 31 “in an explosion while on assignment for
Combustibles magazine.” No such person ever existed. Columbia had created her as a decoy to catch copycats. If some other encyclopedia mentioned Mountweazel as a person, Columbia could confront it for plagiarism. Mountweazel now means a fictitious entry.


Germans have created several fictitious people, as if to atone for the disappearances Hitler ordered. One of them is a diplomat called Edmund Draecke, who “was vice-consul in Bombay in 1911”. Jakob Maria Mierscheid has been a fictitious member of the German parliament since 1979. The parliament web site features him as if he were a real MP, and presents his writings and speeches. It says he breeds stone-eating lice and dome-ringed doves. Both creatures are nonexistent like him.
The Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf boasts a fictitious professor, Ernst Doelle. Deemed universities in India would say this is no big deal. Many of them have fictional campuses. A school campus at Sukhna has held a fascination for General Deepak Kapoor, who likes to fantasise about war on “two fronts”, taking on Pakistan and China simultaneously. Brass hats have a tendency to deteriorate from mentors to tormentors to Dementors.

Kapoor perhaps meant bone china. Englishmen made bone china to compete with imported porcelain. The word porcelain comes from porcellana, the Italian word for cowrie shell which is smooth like china. Porcella in Italian is female piglet. The shells were called porcellana because they resembled the sow’s genitals. This should add to the allure of Bollywood’s porcelain beauties. But think of bologna, the pork sausage, when generals shoot their mouths off—for bologna is also called baloney.
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(The Week)
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