Weasel Words and the Erosion of Trust: A Linguistic Analysis of Workplace and Organizational Abuse

Recent paper on the discourse of abuse and misconduct

Here’s an abstract of this paper: The choice of words, their context, when they are presented, and what is left unsaid all can contribute to a "normalization of deviance," a term coined by Diane Vaughan to describe conduct which creates "an understanding of the situation as normal when faced with increasing evidence that something is going wrong" (Taylor and Goodwin 2022), often for social control or to preempt or prevent sanction (Kramer and Michalowski 2005). Discourse employed for obfuscation are often called "weasel words," which "hedge, cause ambiguity, introduce conjecture and inference as reliance, resulting in a travesty of intellectual honesty" for the sake of "truthiness" (Ott 2018). There is a need to identify the use of weasel words as they are used in abuse and misconduct. By establishing what obfuscated language is and examining its rate of use in allegations or situations of abuse, weasel words can be useful identifiers in such instances.

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