Frederick Ludowyk

On the back cover of Don Watson’s Dictionary of Weasel Words, the entry for ‘absolute certainty’ is reproduced: ‘1. Beyond a doubt; scout’s honour; on impeccable authority, irrefutable evidence; watertight, ironclad; London to a brick; bet your arse (or ass) on it. 2. Not necessarily the case.’ The first definition offers the standard, transparent meanings; the second offers its ‘weasel-word’ meaning – what it means when it is minced through the minds of ‘the powerful, the treacherous and the unfaithful’, particularly bureaucrats and politicians. A citation from Vice President Dick Cheney on 2 September 2002 demonstrates weaseling or weasling in action (see Kate Burridge’s discussion of the process of haplology in her book Weeds in the Garden of Words for the likely transformation of ‘weaseling’ into ‘weasling’): the weaselly vice president says: ‘We do know, with absolute certainty, that he is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs to build a nuclear weapon.

The Cambridge Guide to English Usage is written by the Australian academic Pam Peters, and is an interesting extension of the work she published in The Cambridge Australian English Style Guide (1995). This time Peters examines more than 4000 issues of word meaning, spelling, grammar, punctuation and style as exemplified in the Englishes of the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The book will appeal to both a specialist and a general readership.

The major players here are the UK and the US, and the evidence of usage for these domains is drawn largely from corpora (or should it be corpuses?), especially the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) and a subset of 140 million words of American English from the Cambridge International Corpus (CCAE). The evidence for usage in the other Englishes is not corpus-based, and relies largely on dictionaries, style guides and questionnaires.

In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty, among his various pronouncements to Alice, pontificates on the meanings of names. After describing the name Alice’ as ‘a stupid name enough’, Humpty Dumpty asks her what the name Alice means. Alice is doubtful: ‘Must a name mean something?’ And Humpty Dumpty retorts: ‘Of course it must ... My name means the shape I am – and a good handsome shape it is, too.’ The question of the meaning of Alice’s name is left unanswered in Lewis Carroll’s text, but it is answered in William Noble’s Names from Here and Far: The New Holland Dictionary of Names. Alice, we are told, is an English form of the name Adelaide, which in turn is a compound from the Germanic words athel, meaning ‘noble’, and Hilda, meaning ‘heroine’, or heid, meaning ‘kind’. Thus Alice means something like ‘nobly born’.