I hadn't heard of these weasel words before. Do you agree?

It's a common enough term. I first ran across it in a linguistics class. I've always felt they were related to hedges as a kind of speech act.

I've often seen the phrase used in the sense used in the linked blog. As zmj says, it's a form of hedge.

Interesting. In the Wikipedia article it talks about words that "soften the force" of potentially loaded or controversial words. In this case, I almost see the words "many" and "most" as the opposite. The author doesn't have the data, so he is making the effect stronger than data might show.

I think he used the phrase wrong then.

Then there was Elie Weasel, who ferreted out Nazis.

A colleague at work has the job of vetting papers written for our organisation for statistical rigour before publication. He strikes out words like "most" and "many" with glee.

Of course, in the text of a paper it is not always desirable to cite exact figures; those are available in charts and tables, usually in an appendix. He uses a sort of sliding scale; for instance 54% would be described as a "small majority" whereas 97% would be a "large majority".

We had the same thing happen recently, Arnie. We had to publish a rather sensitive report, and the editor found that the writers had said "most" when their figures showed fewer than 50%, and there were other similar examples. We changed it, but I am not sure anyone would have ever noticed had the report not been so controversial.

As we've said here before, you can make your statistics say just about anything you want them to.

I wrote an MA thesis on the weasely effect of sentence adverbs, using as my specific example the word even. There is a large literature on this word. Here is an example from a speech of former Pres. Clinton - compare with and without the even.

Even welfare mothers are entitled to low cost abortions.
Welfare mothers are entitled to low cost abortions.