The expression first appeared in Stewart Chaplin's short story "Stained Glass Political Platform" (published in 1900 in "The Century Magazine"), in which weasel words were described as "words that suck the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks the egg and leaves the shell". Theodore Roosevelt attributed the term to his friend William Sewall's older brother, Dave, claiming that he used the term in a private conversation in 1879. In another early usage, Theodore Roosevelt argued in 1916 that "one of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use ...'weasel words'; when one 'weasel word' is used ... after another there is nothing left".