Pop goes the weasel

“Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals! Except the weasel.” Homer Simpson.

As you know, in copywriting ‘weasel wording’ usually refers to those bits of copy you’re forced to write that mean you’re not really promising / guaranteeing / saying / doing what you seem.

Apparently the phrase comes from the idea that weasels suck out eggs – leaving a hollow shell, the way weasel words make your promises sound a bit hollow.

Anyway, their existence is often necessary, for good legal reasons, and they don’t necessarily shit all over your copy (much like a well-trained weasel), they just dilute the potency of your hyperbole a little.

But sometimes they just make what you’re saying... not worth saying.

“Here’s a great USP for our home insurance: that we make a customer’s home secure within two hours of a break-in. We should do an ad about that.”

“Yeah, but what if we can’t get there in two hours for some reason?”

“Ok, we’ll say we usually make a customer’s home secure within two hours.”

“We can’t say ‘usually’ because it’s a new service. There’s no data to prove that we do it most of the time.”

“Ok, we’ll say we aim to make a customer’s home secure within two hours.”

“Well, alrighty then. We’ve got ourselves an ad campaign!”

And so the new Direct Line TV ad came to pass. Where they say they aim to make your home secure within two hours of a break-in.

Which means it’s an ad about nothing, really. ‘Aim’ indeed. Why not go further, and say you aim to secure a customer’s home within one hour? Or within one minute? You can always fail, but hey, it’s only an aim.

Hmm. As Homer also said, “Let us all bask in television's warm glowing warming glow.”