Wednesday, July 6: Tune It Or Die!
WEASEL WORDS
by Rob Lopresti
Last week I happened to quote a Seattle Times article about a beast called a martin. My friend Zeke chastised me for misspelling marten. James replied that I had merely been keeping bad company, since I had accurately copied the Times’ mistake. Then both of them indulged in horrible puns about members of the Mustelidae family.
I, of course, am above such loathsome wordplay, but I decided to discuss those beasties today. Not the animals themselves, but their names, and the related words. Because language is our business at CB, and don’t you forget it.
Zeke was quite correct, that the animal the man in Hoquiam was carrying when he broke into an apartment was a marten, but it turns out a martin can be an animal as well. As early as 1300 it was the name for a type of ape (no one knows which). Before 1700 it was the term for hermaphroditic calves. (And does it bother anyone else that they had so many hermaphroditic calves back then that they needed a word for it? What were they putting in the hay?)
But it turns out that when the man with the marten punched the other man the latter became a martin, because by the 1600s the word also meant “victim.”
Pop (goes the weasel) Quiz
I have actually written here before about the peculiarly human habit of turning animal names into verbs. Many of the weasel family have fallen victim to verbification. See if you can match them up.
| 1. to badger | A. to defeat |
| 2. to ermine | B. to equivocate |
| 3. to ferret | C. to harass |
| 4. to sable | D. to make black |
| 5. to skunk | E. to make white |
| 6. to stoat | F. to search out |
| 7. to weasel | G. to sew with invisible stitches |
Extra credit: Which of those animals is an imposter? It is not a member of the mustelidae family. Answers further down the screen.
Vital questions
To which I don’t necessarily have any answers.
Why have so many of these animals have lent their names to sexually loose individuals? A mink is a promiscuous woman. A stoat is a lecher. And, while the OED doesn’t recognize it, I have heard otter used for promiscuous men. (Remember Otter in Animal House?)
What do they call a wolverine in England? Would you believe: a glutton. Think they used that name when they released X-Men in Britain? “There’s the most dangerous mutant of all! The Glutton!” I’m guessing not.
What’s the difference between a weasel and an ermine? The season. Some weasels (called stoats in England) are brown in the summer but turn white when it gets snowy. At first, people thought they were different animals. I learned about this in W.P. Kinsella’s story “Weasels and Ermines.”
How did badger come to mean “harass”? You might assume it has to do with the animal’s behavior, but there is an alternative explanation. The word used to mean “haggle,” coming from early noun meaning of “trader.” You can see how “haggle” could shift to something nastier.
And speaking of badgers, let me indulge myself by quoting the wonderful Brit Com Yes, Minister. In one episode politician Jim Hacker is being, well, badgered by his daughter because the government is about to destroy a badger habitat.
“It’s because badgers haven’t got votes isn’t it? If they did you wouldn’t be exterminating them. You’d be out there shaking paws and kissing cubs!”
Very like a weasel
Getting back to our title, to weasel is to attempt to get out of something, usually by using tricky language. Hence, weasel words or as I prefer to call them, mustelogisms. I thought the term came from the slippery (or slinky) tactics the beast uses to escape, but Theodore Roosevelt begs to disagree. Teddy was a great phrasemaker (bully pulpit, twilight zone, good to the last drop) but he doesn’t get credit for “weasel words.” It had been in print for a decade before he used it on Woodrow Wilson in 1916. But his contribution was explaining it. He said weasels sucked all the meat from an egg, leaving an empty shell. Which captures the fate of a weasel word, doesn’t it?
The answers, my friend
1.C. badger=harass, 2.E. ermine=make white, 3.F. ferret=search out, 4.D. sable=make black, 5.A. skunk=defeat, 6.G. stoat, sew with invisible stitches, 7.B. weasel=equivocate
The skunk is the intruder (as it so often is). I included it in honor of the polecat. I had thought “polecat” was a nickname for skunk, which it is, but there is also an animal by that name in the mustelidae family (a ferret is a type of polecat). Nobody knows how polecats get their name, but apparently some of them stink, which explains how the name slid over to skunks.
And in conclusion
I got through this whole column on words without a single pun. Frankly, I wasn’t sure I could do it, but I figured there was no ermine trying.
Rob, in respect to the extra credit question, I’m pretty certain skunks are members (genera) of mustelidae. I could be wrong, but think they are. Members of this fascinating family have a few things in common– an absence of fear, scent glands, and often elongated bodies. (Mongooses… (mongeese?) look like they could be members of mustelidae but aren’t.)
Regarding ‘polecat, a story I’ve heard bandied by naturalists and zoologists says when settlers from from Europe smelled North American skunks, they were reminded of the European ‘domesticated polecat ferret’ and polecat became a nickname of the stink kitty.
I hadn’t heard the glutton reference before. I wonder if the English ‘wolverine’ refers not to the wolverine’s exaggerated selfish eating habits but might be a corruption of ‘wolferine’?
Ferrets found in pet shops are descendents of those brought from Europe where they were effective ratters, slinking into the nests and laying waste. Weasels, wolverines, minks, and ferrets often engage in a kind of blood lust. Farmers fear a weasel in the henhouse more than a fox, and weasels can exploit the smallest knothole to gain entry. A fox will grab one or two chickens and run; a single weasel might kill every bird in the building. Fishers (not mentioned in the quiz) are one of the few animals able to take on porcupines and win.
The American blackfooted ferret (Mustela nigripes) is so highly endangered that in the past few decades they were twice thought to be extinct due to prairie dog poisoning. Many years ago thanks to an interest in mustelidae, I found myself in a confidential conversation with a naturalist who revealed they’d found a single family, which vets accidentally killed with live-virus vaccines. Several years later, another surviving family was located, but I haven’t heard updates.
While the etymology of “wolverine” (originally and currently spelled “wolverene” in Britain) does indeed come from the inflectional stem of “wolf”, the animal itself, Gulo luscus, has commonly been called a “glutton” in British English usage since at least the 17th century. There has never been a word “wolferine”. The proper adjective meaning wolf-like or relating to wolves is “lupine”.
You are absolutely correct, though, that skunks (Mephitis mephitica) are members of the weasel family mustelidae.
Oh, goodie, a taxonomy war.
Skunks were “until recently” classified as part of the mustilidae,according to the entries I checked Googling “skunk taxonomy”. The cladists (read Naming Nature) classify organisms according to lines of descent. By this definition, “fish” includes amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, because there is no common-ancestor group that includes fishy fish that does not include us. (I fish that weren’t so. On the other hand, it turns out that whales are fish after all . . .)
Though it isn’t ferret’s the way it is.