Weasle-sucked words

for those of you wondering what a weasle-sucked words are, let me explain the metaphor. Weasles, when they come across an untended birds nest, have been known to just poke a hole in the egg and suck out the insides, then leave the shell. So when the mother returns there still appears to be a nest full of eggs. So a weasle sucked word would be a word or phrase that appears at first to have meaning, but when you look alittle closer, you learn that it is just a shell of communication. Some examples would be "Charismatic" "Right-wing" and the phrase "support our Troops." A weasle-sucked word is in need of another modifier to have any significant communicative power.

self-absorbtion

Walker Percy, in his book Lost in the Cosmos makes the point that the modern human self is empty. He points out that we attempt to fill our vacous soul with the meaning of the things of the world around us but, instead of ending up with a meaningful self, we end up with a meaningless world. Our empty modern souls devour the fullness of the meaningfulness around us and leave only invisible (to us at least) meaningless stuff. This is why, he argues, our fashion, funiture and culture flop between retro and grotesque (or both at once), because we imagine that the inherited meaning of old stuff or the shock value of "completely new" stuff will give our selfhood, previously drained of meaning by our self-absorbtion, lasting meaning, but instead, you get meaningless tye-dye and mullets and nudity and negliges in public that are no longer seductive in the bedroom. Perhaps this is also the reason behind moderns inability to use, understand, or develop subtlety and fullness of symbolism. When we do attempt it, we use it like morse code or worse, like bible code and end up with weasle sucked words.