Friday, April 23, 2010

Not so much impossible, closer to improbable.

Sometimes changes in word usage are required or suggested to reflect changes in the culture. Here are some updates that I suggest for the near future.
  1. A contract between two parties where the value of the contract is linked to the price of another financial instrument or by a specified event or condition and may be insured against its inevitable failure,  we will call that Greed.
  2. When a person is incapable of accepting multiple examples of written documentation as proof that something occurred, if the same person uses words like un-American or Socialist or Muslim or Gangster to describe another person because they are afraid to use the word they really want to use, and if that person prefers to shield their social misgivings in a political party that's named after a historical event that has little resemblance to the proposed politics of the party - despite protestations and other self-designations - for ease's sake they will be called Racist.
  3. A person who would rather that their child has less education on a topic than more, the most polite designation will now be Fundamentalist.
  4. Anyone who is afraid of gay people or afraid to be mistaken as one, in an effort to reclaim and empower former victims of the word, will be referred to as Faggit (sic).
  5. A body that offers unsecured loans at high interest rates to individuals, often backed by blackmail and threats of violence, and that have designed their credit products in such a way as to make orderly retirement of the debt difficult was formerly known as a loanshark. These financial practices have been refined and have reached the mainstream making loansharks obsolete, and from now on using the word Bank or Banks will be all that's necessary to indicate the use of such predatory lending.
  6. An organization that takes money with a promise of services with no intention of making good, or may change the terms and conditions of payment without warning and in their favor, I propose we call Health Insurance. There is some contention here as there have been other strongly suggested candidates: Credit Card Companies, The Government, and Roommates.

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