“He knew … that flight was impossible; that he was tied fast under the shadow of the axe; and that in spite of his utmost tergiversation and treachery in furtherance of the reigning terror, a word might bring it down upon him.” That’s from A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, and it’s a rare example of using the word “tergiversation.”
“Tergiversate,” which is the verb form of the same word, comes from two Latin words: “tergum,” which means the back, and “vertere,” which means to turn. “Tergiversari” was the Latin version of the whole word, and while it literally meant “to turn your back,” it also meant to be evasive.
Both meanings came with “tergiversate” when it entered English in the 1600s. It was used to mean turning your back on someone or something — particularly in politics, as in “turning your back on your party” — and it also meant doing your best to avoid answering a question directly. That’s the sense Dickens was using, and it’s also what C.M.Yonge meant in an 1877 article in the Monthly Packet: “Wyatt was examined again and again, and wavered and tergiversated a good deal.”
The “equivocating” meaning of “tergiversate” has tended to predominate, at least more recently. There’s some evidence that the “deserting your party” meaning was more common in earlier times; the older the dictionary, the more likely “deserting your party” is listed as the primary meaning of the word.
Nowadays, of course, “tergiversate” is extremely obscure — even in Dickens’ time, the word was fading from use. It’s not because people have recently become more direct and forthright; far from it. I think it’s because nowadays we’ve agreed that “weaseling” means about the same thing, and it’s a lot more fun to say.
