weaselly

adj

1. Resembling a weasel (in appearance).

   “The writer had just entered into his eighteenth year, when he met at the table of a certain Anglo-Germanist an individual, apparently somewhat under thirty, of middle stature, a thin and weaselly figure, a sallow complexion, a certain obliquity of vision, and a large pair of spectacles.”

   ““Pretty?” […] Mr. Prestcott considered. “Fair to middling. Bit weaselly, if you know what I mean. Wouldn’t have been much without makeup. As it was, she managed to look quite attractive.””

   “At three minutes past six the door opened to admit the naked, scrawny figure of Tingaling Bell. He had a sharp weasely face and a miserable body on which each bone showed.”

   “On still weasellier, greasier members of the clique.”

   “I lifted the extension, slowly released the button, easing in mid-ring like the weaselliest weasel.”

2. Devious; cunning; misleading; sneaky.

   “1864, W. S. Gilbert, “Sixty-Three and Sixty-Four” originally published in Fun, V (2 January 1864), p. 162, later published in Bab Ballads, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970, p. 37, With intellect weaselly, artist has easily earned all his bacon and greens by it, And now that it’s done and all ready for Fun, it’s my duty to say what he means by it.”

   ““Ah was vara weaselly. Ah wasna going home without yon stoof for Captain Harker. Vara coonning ah was.””

   “Menemencioglu could see no good reason why this weasely document should not be interpreted so as to keep Turkey out of a war in which he and the other Turkish leaders were convinced she could do no better than be uselessly crushed […]”

   ““There’s a poem I like,” Harry said. “By Robert Graves. About cats. Cats, he says, make their point by walking round it. It’s all right for cats. For humans, as you say—weaselly. Why don’t they come out with it?””

   “It was one of the strangest elections I have ever witnessed, even odder than the 1988 presidential race, when two yahoos named George Bush and Michael Dukakis ended what Hunter S. Thompson declared “The Generation of Swine” by conducting the weaselliest, most vacuous, idealess campaign in the nation’s history.”