As a follow-up to my piece on skunked terms, it might be worthwhile to consider another type of communication that goes by an animal name: weasel words. The term first appeared in print in 1900, in a ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. Watson, once a speechwriter for former Australian prime minister Paul ...

Recent news reports quoted former Equifax CEO Richard Smith, when appearing before Congress, as saying, “Mistakes were made.” Besides vying for Understatement of the Year, that statement is yet ...

For the last few years, reasonable people of various ideological leanings have been lamenting the scourge that is the word “problematic.” Cropping up particularly in online discussions about social ...

University of Sydney provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU. Politics is a language game: in any given context, who gets what, when and how invariably depends on how things with no ...

I mean to put in a good word here for the journalist’s unsung friend the weasel word. When you want to say something categorical but are afraid to—because, damn it, what if you’re wrong?—the weasel ...