February 23, 2015 5:16PM # Austerity, A New Weaselword By [Steve H. Hanke](https://www.cato.org/people/steve-h-hanke) --- SHARE The financial press has become inundated with the word “austerity.” Since Greece’s left-wing Syriza proclaimed an “[anti-austerity revolution](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/world/europe/a-deal-that-preserves-greeces-place-in-eurozone-and-fiscal-restraints.html?_r=0),” strong adjectives, like “incredibly savage,” precede that overused word. What was once a good word has become a weaselword. That, according to the *Oxford Dictionary*, is “a word that destroys the force of a statement, as a weasel ruins an egg by sucking out its contents.” How could that be? Well, in the hands of an unscrupulous or uninformed writer, the inversion of a perfectly good word into a weaselword is an easy task. All one has to do is leave the meaning of a word undefined or vague, rendering the word’s meaning so obscure as to make it non-operational. With that, a meaningless weaselword is created. In its current usage, the word austerity is so obscure as to evoke [Fritz Machlup’s](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Machlup) paraphrase of Goethe’s line from *Faust*: To conceal ignorance, Mephistopheles counsels a student to misuse words. Such is the story and fate of austerity. [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).