Spot the Frippet: weasel.

How do you tell a stoat from a weasel?

Well, a weasel is weaselly distinguished, and a stoat is stoatily different.

All right, all right, please yourselves...

This is a Least Weasel:


photograph by Keven Law

but exactly what a weasel is depends upon where you are. In Britain a weasel is probably something called a weasel, but in America and in academia weasel can mean any member of the genus Mustela, which includes stoats and polecats and mink. 

Depending on how you define the word, there are about seventeen species of weasel, and they're found in nearly all of Eurasia and in the Americas about down to the Amazon River. They're all small, and would fit comfortably on your hand (except for the fact that they'd probably be trying to bite your thumb off). They're fierce predators, and those slim hips are especially designed to follow their prey down tunnels.

In Greece weasels also, it is said, prey on wedding dresses, an unhappy bride having once turned into a weasel and still apparently on the look-out for revenge.

Weasels aren't all bad luck - we're just past the lucky weasel-killing season in Mecklenburg, Germany (it ended on Sept 8th) so you won't be able to make a lucky weasel amulet from one, as in times past - but mostly weasels do seem to bring misfortune.

Still, seeing a Mustela weasel isn't easy (unless you're talking about a sly or treacherous person: they get everywhere) but weasel words are common. These are deliberately misleading or evasive, and spotting them is essential.

You may also spot a weaselling out, which is an avoiding of responsibility in a really inconvenient or despicable way.

If you're in America you might spot a truly useful weasel if you're in the far north, where it is a truck with caterpillar tracks designed for use on snow.

Spot the Frippet: a weasel. The Old English for this was weosule. Weasel words originate in the belief that a weasel could suck the contents out of an egg without piercing the shell.