- The Guardian
- Issue #2116
Meaningfully
A Guardian contributor wrote to the Victorian government about its approval of the Enterprise gas field in the face of the best science available telling us we can’t afford more fossil fuel projects. In reply came several hundred weaselly words assuring them that having more gas somehow didn’t mean there would be more gas, as well as using the drug dealer’s defence (if people don’t get the gas from us, they’ll get it from someone else).
One particularly weaselly word stood out: ‘meaningfully.’
“The approval of the Enterprise project is not expected to meaningfully increase Victoria’s greenhouse gas emissions because it will not increase fossil gas demand”
Just because there’s more of a climate-change-causing substance around, doesn’t mean more people will use it? Makes you wonder why they bother extracting the stuff.
The people who are getting the gas out of the ground think there’s 352 kilotonnes of Liquefied Petroleum Gas there. It’s very meaningful to them.
Axis
Not the ones you had to study in maths classes at school, ‘axis’ is an old favourite. It just always means a group of countries that have been deemed evil. Italy, Japan, and Germany were an axis during WW2. They were genuinely evil and also were in a real alliance, but the good thing about the word is that the countries concerned don’t have to actually be working together.
‘Axis’ got its first weaselly outing after 911, when US president George W Bush talked about “the axis of evil” as though Iran, Iraq, and the DPRK were in a genuine team-up like something from a superhero comic. Keeping up with Bush’s love of alliteration, the latest axis is “an authoritarian axis” that US think-tanker Thomas Mahnken has described as a reason for the US preparing to fight three wars at once.
Normative
Usually a word for professional philosophers, for whom ‘normative’ means something that relates to ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts.’ Neoliberal economist Milton Friedman said that economics should be independent of normative judgements, meaning it didn’t matter if his brand of economics led to massive human suffering (it did). For weaselly writers wanting to be more impressive, ‘normative’ makes them look smarter.
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has said that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the TPNW, has ‘substantial normative value.’ Also Australia will never sign this treaty because we don’t want to do anything the United States won’t do. So in Wong-speak “substantial normative value” means “that’s nice, but yeah nah.”
Inflammatory
Like ‘divisive’ or ‘controversial,’ ‘inflammatory’ can be used weaselishly to say that someone’s views or comments are bad without actually spelling out why or how they’re bad. People use ‘divisive’ to bad-mouth comments on areas on which we’re all pretty divided already. Treasurer Jim Chalmers has said that the Reserve Bank’s interest rate calls are “smashing the economy.” Former Treasurer Peter Costello, retired after a lifetime of putting the boot in, finds this “inflammatory.” What’s inflamed exactly? Will there be a civil war between the government and the bank? Don’t hold your breath.
Union business (not)
ACTU Secretary Sally McManus has listed a gaggle of allegations against CFMEU officials, admitting that they haven’t been proven, and then said that “None of this is union business.” Indeed perpetrating corruption, intimidation and crime isn’t union business, although fighting against it is. Supporting an undemocratic and lawless administration which will absolutely be used by employers and the Coalition to attack other workers isn’t union business either, so we’re not sure if McManus has the hang of this term.
