a description applied to something that is uninspiring, ineffective, underwhelming, or otherwise below reasonable expectations and/or not as good as comparable items, as in “I thought the keynote presentation would be a hit but those new products they introduced were weak sauce”; draws an analogy to a hot sauce that fails to provide the expected levels of spiciness, making it unsuitable for its intended purpose; as with several other examples of jargon (goat rodeo, push back, watch-out, etc.) speakers use this term to soften the harshness of something potentially negative; never to be used with an article, the grammatically unusual usage further heightens its impact: “that’s weak sauce” is correct, while “that’s a weak sauce” is not