Mean as a suck-egg weasel
WEASEL, n. The English language unfairly maligns this small mammalian predator, using its name to mean a conniving, duplicitous person, or the act of “weaseling out” of an obligation or a promise. Sometimes writing teachers talk about “weasel words,” language used to create the impression of citation or authority where none exists, most recognizable in that favored phrase of the current U.S. president, “many people are saying.”
This is an insult to weasels.
From the OED, here is the origin of “weasel words,” and also likely of “weasel (out)” as a verb, from another U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt, in an article he wrote that was published in the magazine Maine, My State:
‘His words weasel the meaning of the words in front of them,’ said David, ‘just like a weasel when he sucks the meat out of an egg and leaves nothing but the shell’.
It’s unlikely that Roosevelt invented the expression, but he’s famous so he gets to be the person cited in the OED.
I had always assumed that “weasel out” came from how slinky and bendy the animals look, but apparently it’s this egg-sucking thing. American English speakers also say, or used to say, “egg-sucker,” “suck-egg” (as in “mean enough to suck eggs” and “mean as a suck-egg dog”), and “go suck an egg” or “go suck eggs” (go away, take a hike), possibly related to this notion that weasels suck eggs, which I guess we think is an untrustworthy thing to do?
You’ll note that egg-sucking is also ascribed to dogs in the expressions above, and in my many searches for writing this newsletter, I came across citations from the Mississippi Supreme Court that refer to suck-egg dogs. (Be warned: both cases are about shooting someone’s dog.) I’m putting that link there because I simply can’t keep this information to myself, not because I have anything to say about the notion of suck-egg dogs other than “what.”
Sometimes US English speakers also refer to an untrustworthy or badly behaved person as “a bad egg,” which I always assumed was a rotten egg, as in the children’s taunt “last one there’s a rotten egg,” but maybe the bad egg is an empty eggshell? The only thing that’s clear to me here is that we, as a people, look askance at eggs and egg-related behaviors, whether committed by humans, dogs, or weasels.
“Weasel words” is a twentieth-century Americanism, but the notion of weasels (sneakily) sucking eggs is older and it shows up twice in Shakespeare:
The weasel Scot
Comes sneaking, and so sucks her princely eggsfrom Henry V
I can suck
Melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs.from As You Like It
The interesting thing about weasels sucking eggs is that they don’t fucking do it. Nobody has ever proved it, anyway. And if you think about what a weasel’s mouth looks like, they’re not really built for boring an imperceptible hole into an eggshell and then vacuuming up the contents. (Same for dogs.) Weasels do eat eggs, and they’re infamous for killing chickens, but I’m pretty sure when that happens, it’s a straight-up horror movie and not, like, a Weekend at Bernie’s surprise twist situation.
Technically this Youtube video shows a marten, not a weasel, but same (crime) family. You can see what happens to the egg at the end.
We English speakers just cannot abide the mere idea of an eggshell with no goo inside—the betrayal—and so British author Brian Jacques wrote twenty-two whole children’s fantasy novels dedicated to the idea that mice are heroic warrior monks while weasels, stoats, and foxes are “vermin hordes.” Love to develop an imaginary world for children founded on the idea that entire species have personality characteristics, some of which are irredeemably evil! No bad implications there!
An illustration of Ferahgo the Assassin, one of many weasels in the Redwall series, sourced from this wiki. Also I loved all these books as a kid and have overcome their anti-fox and -weasel indoctrination, change is possible.
I started thinking about all this because I wanted to write one character calling another character a “weasel” in my current novel draft (dialogue that would, naturally, be met with an objection). But my draft is set in France, so even though I’m writing in English, there’s a sort of pseudotranslation going on: the characters “speak” French. I’m not really constrained by French grammar or vocabulary—anybody who wants to fight me about “accuracy” can start with the fact that magic exists in the world of this novel—but I do like to know when I’m breaking the rules. Plus, as we all know, I love a dictionary entry. So I checked to see if French also assigns duplicitousness to weasels, and in fact, it doesn’t!
I googled “weasel eggs” in French just to make sure this folklore doesn’t exist in the language, and all my search results were French farmers advising each other on how to keep weasels out of their chicken coops, plus the Youtube surveillance footage above. It’s only us anglophones who have this weird phobia.
The French word for weasel is “belette,” a feminine noun that derives from the word for “beautiful” (bel) and a suffix -ette that means something small. The Trésor de la langue française rudely claims this use of “beautiful” is antiphrasis, which is a fancy rhetorical word for saying the opposite of what you mean. Excuse me, Trésor de la langue française, please look at this weasel and tell me she’s not gorgeous.
Stunning! An image of Mustela nivalis, the Least weasel, native to Europe, Northern Asia, and North America. She’s the Most weasel in my heart. Sourced from Wikipedia.
The Italian word for weasel follows the same pattern as French. It’s “donnola,” which is “little lady.” Same thing for Portuguese “doninha.” All of these words replaced an earlier form derived from Latin “mustela”—animal words are especially susceptible to replacement (and other weirdness)—and ironic or not, “little beauty” and “little lady” are much nicer than anything in the Germanic language family, including “weasel” itself, which can perhaps be traced back to a Proto-Germanic root that means “a stinking animal.”
French does use “belette” to means things other than animals in the genus Mustela, though. But it doesn’t mean untrustworthy. It means, with affection, a charming young woman, or—without affection—a “naive idiot girl.” Yikes. Not sure that’s an improvement over the array of options we have in English.
Anyway, even if weasels did literally suck eggs, they’re still just trying to eat. They don’t deserve this defamation. At this point, we should call sucking the meaning out of words “presidenting.” Leave the genus Mustela alone.
This week I had some volunteer interpreting gigs and a few other engagements, and I had to get a new hermit crab shell for my entire digital life (i.e. a laptop) because 2020 is the year all my technology breaks at once, and then the US news got so chaotically fascinating that I finished no books.
I did “attend” a virtual talk given by Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose beautiful book about science, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the teachings of plants, Braiding Sweetgrass, I discussed previously. Her talk was as good as her book, which is to say, very. She answered all the audience questions warmly. She treats the climate crisis with the seriousness it deserves but still manages to be powerfully uplifting.
In small-r romance, while I didn’t finish anything, I’m in the middle of Joanna Bourne’s My Lord and Spymaster, a romance set against a backdrop of early 19th-century English espionage. Like all Bourne’s books, it is gorgeous. Also, appropriately for this newsletter, it features a ferret. Not quite a weasel, but same family.
See you next suck-egg Sunday!
