This is NOT a sports post. If all you want to read is a sports post, stop now and turn around.

This post is quite frankly about weasels. Specifically, it is about the bad rap weasels get. And believe me, your weasel is villified for no good reason.

I was reading a New York Times editorial yesterday. It was criticizing the Security Council of the United Nations for something or other — it doesn’t matter what — and it said the Security Council sanctions had “weasel wording.”

The New York Times prides itself on being fair to all creatures in the world. It owns my paper. And yet it casually tosses off a line like that about weasels. How is a weasel to feel?

How did weasels get such a bad reputation? You may not know this but weasels are related to stoats, ermines and European minks. No one goes around saying or writing about “ermine wording.”

According to Wikipedia — OK I admit, I did my research on Wikipedia — according to Wikipedia your weasel got a bad rep because it snatches poultry from farms. But so do foxes and no one ever talks about fox wording, although to be “foxy” can mean clever or sexy according to context. Wikipedia also wrote the weasel engages in the “mesmerizing weasel war dance.” I’m not kidding. But this mesmerizing dance hardly factors into the weasel’s bad rep.

I have a theory. I think it’s the word weasel that gets weasels in trouble. Weasel sounds so, well, weasly. It’s the hard “ee” sound sliding into that “ss” and it makes you think of something slinking around and doing underhanded stuff. If weasels were called “puppies” no one would despise them.

That’s my theory. What’s yours — and don’t try to weasel out of this one.