Last year, someone at US dictionary Merriam-Webster noticed that lots of people were looking up the word tergiversation online. It was because Washington Post columnist George Will had used it in a piece about the US senator Lindsey Graham. ‘During the government shutdown,’ he had written, ‘Graham’s tergiversations — sorry, this is the precise word — have amazed’.
It might have been the precise word, but it has two meanings: one is ‘desertion or abandonment of a cause, apostasy’; the other is ‘shifting, shuffling, equivocation, prevarication’. Both are pejorative, taking the idea of turning one’s back on a principle, since the Latin for ‘back’ is tergum. From the context, Mr Wills meant the latter.
An early use of tergiversation comes in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, used in a synonymous doublet with cautel: ‘crafty cauteles and tergiversations’. Cautel, from Latin cautela, a precaution or exception in law, was coming to the end of its two-century career in English, while tergiversation was just beginning.
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