12. “We owe a great enrichment of our language to the Americans, because they were the ones who coined the characteristic term ‘weasel-word.’ This little predator . . . can allegedly suck the content of an egg without doing any harm to the shell. This reflects the fact that weasel words deprive terms of their actual meaning as soon as they are added. . . . [T]he term ‘sozial’ is the weasel-word par excellence. Nobody knows what it actually means. But it is definitely true that a social market economy is no market economy . . . social justice is not justice—and I am afraid a social democracy is no democracy either” (Hayek 1979, 16).

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 573