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When not occupied avoiding reptile raptors during my U days, I tried doing the same to dodge the dangers of using the latest trendy lingo. Wasn’t easy. I often slipped and failed. 

But in an effort to be true I’d try reminding my bewildered self that despite being able to speak certain terms I was up to my neck in confusion when it came to swimming the waters of definition. 

Also, being a reverse snob, I felt secure that those glibly talking existentialism had no more firm idea what that was or meant than I. As with the existence of Tolkien’s ring of power, we were, all of us, deceived. 

The one side being snobbish about snobbery, the other side was knot-headed on basics. If, IF a thing were an existential threat, as example, we’d likely not be around to discuss it, would we? Existential threats are mostly literary and argument devices meant to sound serious about nonsense (nonsense because it warns of what hasn’t, didn’t, won’t happen). 

Mouthing about existential threats and realities makes the empty mouth sound more knowing and important. Think, then, of popularized terms as being akin to lipstick making an empty mouth appear bolder or desirable. Glossy emptiness no less empty. 

 A recent favorite (we see in societies words pop into bloom for a certain season until replaced by the latest flower of the mo) is fungible. 

You could have gone a lifetime without needing that one, but sadly its time arrived and now we’ll be stuck hearing and seeing it until something puffier in sound value comes along. In many instances I’ve heard it was difficult to tell what was meant. Did the user of the term have at home an amusing hamster or entertaining gerbil making it fun? Who could tell when a term removed from its legal use became applied to commerce in general? 

Use of a popularized expression might mean little more than “I seek popular acceptance.” 

Good, and I wish the term and its user well, but use of a fancy term doesn’t mean the user or audience knows anything more from its use. 

 Infrequently used words/expressions can halt the audience for stop-think pause. I think that’s quite OK. Uncommon terms can also be used to show off or (as aptly) put off an opposition position. 

Play with words is stimulating activity people do a lot more than we might realize. But if your topic is important the best way to present it, understand it and aid others understand it is, in my view, in clear text, plain and simple as it can be made. 

Take, as example, the current pop use of fungible. It means, well, what does it? Things can be exchanged for currency and at times as currency. But what does that tell us? Does a ton of coal have the same value as the money spent to buy it? If desperately needed to keep a steam engine running, maybe more. But also maybe less because a pile of grimy coal isn’t easily moved as is a stack of coins. The coal might, as well, be worth less for having to move it to where it’s needed or post guards to keep half frozen poor folk from pilfering. 

Fungible is, I believe, a lot tricker to understand than the glib way it’s use often suggests leaving out the gray-gray-gray areas of bedevilment. 

 Encountering some of these slippery word beasts it might be a good practice to simply question their use. Is it accurate and appropriate? Is the use honest? 

A consensus verdict is one way to establish honesty, but 12 folk saying they think someone guilty is not the same as b&w proof of same. 

In any case, probably not a good step to accept pretty terms as being more valid or persuasive than plain talk. When thief becomes market manipulator we’re being played. 

 Earlier in the piece I mentioned hamsters and gerbils. These, from my observation, have fallen out of favor to the same degree as raising chinchillas and the ranching of chickens. You may not recall when those two were high on the list of ways to get ahead in the world and be your own boss, which turned out being an absolute impoverished slave to little furry mites that keeled over dead if you sneezed from 10 feet away or to feathered egg-laying reptiles with scant survival instincts. 

Wild creatures know a dot or two about staying alive. Domesticated animals look with happily glowing eyes at the axe coming to separate head from hulk. If you want a visible definition of disorganized watch a headless chicken trying to put its life in order.  

 From my point of view there’s little worth in me telling you what to think about this or that and why. Trying to fix the world with language patches doesn’t interest me. 

What piques my noggin are patterns that speak of newness and change and opportunity but end up being exactly where they began. I’m not being pessimistic. Quite the contrary, I’m fully optimal optimist about the repetition of old patterns over and again and again. 

Whatever the Ill society goes after to fix it seems to end up with roughly the same problem working away under a different banner. Repression by religion gets replaced by repression by state. The ills of patriarchal excess are roughly the same as those done by any other power group. 

Do any of us trust that gender inequalities would be improved by adding more genders or (as a geezer such as I might argue) inequalities are subject to much (if any) modification by decree or even by the power of prayer. 

 Puffing up with pretty terms doesn’t make for smart. We remain (as Desmond Morris called us in an earlier time) little more than somewhat clever, and of all the apes, the naked ones. 

We don’t like to feel the breeze on our unprotected posteriors, but not liking it doesn’t stop the wind. If belief, faith, imagination, clan, politics or vocabulary don’t define what’s real then what does?