for those who have doubts about the word social

taken from a comment to a post on a blog ("scobleizer") :

1. This reminds me of an old discussion about social software.
   Friedrich Hayek famously said that the word ’social’ empties the noun it is applied to of their meaning. Hayek goes on:
   “it has in fact become the most harmful instance of what, after Shakespeare’s ‘I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs’ ( As You Like It , II, 5), some Americans call a ‘weasel word’. As a weasel is alleged to be able to empty an egg without leaving a visible sign, so can these words deprive of content any term to which they are prefixed while seemingly leaving them untouched. A weasel word is used to draw the teeth from a concept one is obliged to employ, but from which one wishes to eliminate all implications that challenge one’s ideological premises. “

   Comment by Kevin Marks — February 16, 2007 @ 5:35 pm