Would you like jam with your waffle words?

As always, word choice is key. Waffle is the word choice of the day. Waffle words are those words that can get you out of a jam.

The VPD have this swanky new weapon for crowd control that can cause hearing damage, but:

Houghton said police don't plan to use the device for anything more than communication.

"The primary function we're using the device for is its ability to communicate with very large groups with respect to crowd control, evacuations, tactical situations where we may need the loudspeaker portion of it," he said. (emphasis mine)

Note the phrase PLAN TO USE. They did not say the police won't use it, they said they don't plan to use it. What they are saying is:

They don't plan to use the device for anything more than communication[, but we will if we want to]. The square bracketed part of the text is the silent part of the sentence. Kind of like the b in debt (what the olympics has us up to our eyeballs in).

Scenario:

The police use the sound weapon on protesters and the police and afterwards are confronted with "you lied, you said you wouldn't use it as a weapon" and the police say "no, we didn't lie. We never said that. What we said was, we didn't PLAN to use it as a weapon."

That said, I don't believe for a moment that they don't plan to use it as a weapon. Why? Because if they do use it, they have to have a plan in place to know the circumstances under which to use it along with how to use it.

I wonder if they will try to use it on my Nolympic Garden Parties ^TM

More on this dastardly deafening device over at The Straight Goods