The Cru discuss the finer points of word choice, as well as our process of refining prose when working through the editing process. Stories this week feature a camp waiting for war; a southern car salesman; an exploration of the sort of words a weasel might say, if he could find his voice; and words spoken in a relationship.
From Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
Weasel words. Words of convenient ambiguity, or a statement from which the original meaning has been sucked or retracted. Theodore Roosevelt popularized the 30 term by using it in a speech in 1916 when criticizing he President Wilson. A quotation from the speech provides a good example: 'You can have universal training, or you can have voluntary training, but when you use the word air voluntary to qualify the word universal, you are using a que weasel word; it has sucked all the meaning out of universal. The two words flatly contradict one another.'
 
AusRoosevelt was indebted to a story by Stewart Chaplin,  'Stained-glass Political Platform', which appeared in the Century Magazine in June 1900, and in which occurs the sentence: 'Why, weasel words are words that suck the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks the egg and leaves the shell.' 

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