Words Poorly Used #108 -- Information

It's just a system.  It is independent of ideas of right and wrong.  Data goes in and it gets transformed in the process that awaits it.  The output is a direct result of the process.  The process can be tinkered with to produce relatively true or false information.  The output is just in formation -- in a formal structure.  That formal structure, presentation, sometimes fools its patrons -- if it looks orderly (and truth should be orderly) then it must be true.  Watch out for data dressed formally.

-- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #107 -- Humility

We often use humility to mean un-self-centered and objective, not acting on an assumption of superiority.  Most dictionaries, however, say that the word comes from the Latin word for low.  I cannot accept the gradation of humans that presents them as prisoners of a caste system.  I think what we are looking for is a better word that says "down to earth," "level-headed," "even handed," "unassuming," "objective," "worthwhile," and so forth.

-- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #106 -- Consensus

It rears its ugly head again.  I'm talking about the populist tendency to subsume the existence of substantial discord by uttering a stupid statement containing the word, "consensus," or its equivalent.  Today, I saw this in print, "most scientists today will agree ... "  What possible difference does it make what scientists agree on?  Isn't science about disciplined observation, not some polling process?  In fact, it is the scientist who is going in the most unique direction, who is on the path less taken, who will make the next new discovery.  He should be in a minority of one until the bulk of his field have reviewed the findings and found them to be supported by repeatable evidence.  How many scientists will agree on something has nothing to do with the scientific method or the existence of a phenomenon.

 -- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #105 -- Insurance

A substantial part of my jagged career was spent in the vineyards of the property and casualty insurance business.  I learned that, in its principled form, true insurance was only possible where every unit was equally exposed to a loss.  The textbooks told me that flooding was not an insurable peril because only the people who expected flood would buy it.  The private sector insurance industry, therefore, does not voluntarily underwrite flood insurance (they do, by the way, cover non-flood water damage -- anybody's pipes can burst).  The politicians, for the sake of euphemism, call flood reimbursement "insurance."  It is actually subsidy of reckonless risktaking.

-- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used, Another Devil's Dictionary #3

• Clarity -- in politics, that which is to be avoided at all costs.
• Unnecessary -- anything spouted by a former political minion who has been handed the pink slip.
• Crudit -- That which is claimed by a politico when trying to cover a disaster by characterizing it as a great triumph.
• Canard -- an unfounded rumor or story, usually related to a political disaster, usually in 180 degree opposition to any segment of truth.
• Damage Control -- the default mode of any politician.
• Spin -- see Damage Control.

Words Poorly Used #104 -- Clarity

POTUS keeps having a legislative and executive agenda, but he appears to fear any kind of specificity regarding details.  Is this so that he can claim that any misshapen mess represents a success of deal-making?  The word misused in this case is "clarity."  It is misused in that it is not pursued where it should be.  Politicians like to keep their powder dry, to use an old piece of figurative language.  They prefer to let the unforeseen consequences occur, then take credit for whatever has happened.  If they practice clarity beforehand, they would be constrained to a logical outcome.  But their motto obviously is always take credit, never take blame.  A stark example was shown this week when congress persons pointed out that there were no details about tax reform.  That is by design; no matter what happens to the effort, everybody can claim clairvoyance.

 -- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #103 -- Charity

With repeated catastrophes, one cannot be on the scene helping in most cases.  Sometimes we can only donate money or time through surrogates.  It is frustrating trying to assist charities.  Like all organizations, they have pockets of management dysfunction, pockets of people problems.  This is also the reason why big government bureaucracies have so many fail points, many egregious fail points.

-- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #102 -- AI

Putin and Musk are holding forth on the future of AI.  They, and most the rest of us, act like AI is a stage play that is evolving toward a tightly plotted ending.  Observations:

• AI is in the Stone Age.  We've been wrestling with the mouse for over 3 decades.  That is glacial change.
• There is little NI (Natural Intelligence) among our popular leadership.  AI will be politicized, so that PI will stay in the hands of incompetents.
• We will try to weaponize AI, thereby stalling it as we did with atomic research.  The same is happening on several scientific fronts -- genetic, environmental, and mememetic (educational) spring to mind.
• "Strategery" and dumbing down has doomed our civilization.

Words Poorly Used #101 -- Criteria

Many people confuse criteria with filters, others dispense with criteria altogether.  Criteria actually are critical thinking stations in determining truth.  They are existential, distinguishing the "is" from the "isn't," and the "may be."  The world underestimated Hurricane Harvey because the presumptive category-system of predicting a storm's impact measured the wrong things, and/or not enough of the right things.  It turns out that most of the government measures are filters strictly for size and speed and direction that may answer over-the-ocean questions but hardly address any on-land questions other than a single point of when plus where.  How many systems askew of true criteria do we maintain?

-- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used, Another Devil's Dictionary #2

Pardon -- a POTUS ploy used to uncatch a caught henchman so that said henchman may hench again.

Political Ego -- a power more potent than a thousand suns, but which will resist all attempts at harnessing for good until the end of time.

Science -- a catchall which may be cited to bolster a generalization which may not have any science behind it.

Swamp -- a festering miasma which continues to expand at a pace that exceeds that at which we discuss draining it.

Crony -- a scoundrel who is in until he is out.

Words Poorly Used #100 -- Pardon

A pardon should be given to correct a miscarriage of justice, not to perpetrate another injustice.  A pardon under the law is to make the law more humane, not to unleash the lawless upon the land.  The spoils system is there, advisedly or not, to reward the faithful, but its rewards should never relieve the true felon.  Once again, the mighty have shown that they spit on the constraints of social grace.

-- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #99 -- Anarchism

The suffix "-ism" denotes a belief or action system.  This is a concept hampered, nearly to destruction, by internal conflict.  Anarchy is.  Whether you believe in it or not is immaterial.  Anarchy is.  Whether you act to gain it or not is immaterial.  The thing to believe in and to act upon is voluntaryism.  It encompasses anarchy, it is independent of any form of -archy.  If one lives the life of voluntary, individual one-to-one agreement, no -archy need apply.

-- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #98 -- Culture

Throughout the life sciences, "culture" is a flowering, while degradation is a rotting.  Why are we using the one word where the other should be?  Culture is the means by which we evolve in a general forward sense within a generation.  Degradation is the failure to survive by the unfit.  Civilization advances by evolution, and thereby, in part, by culture.  Degradation spins out the downward arc of extinction.

 -- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #97 -- Market Failure

Markets do not fail.  Does gravity fail?  Interventions fail.  If you see what looks like a market failure, it is in fact the failure of a previously attempted market intervention.

-- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #95 -- Obligation

In a recent Socrates Cafe of Louisville, we voted to deliberate the old chestnut, "can there be a just war?"  Why we did this, I don't know.  Maybe we hoped this time would be different, wherein we would come up with a no nonsense answer.  Foiled again.  One of the reasons this attempt was abortive, however, was that we kept getting into the tall weeds of what an individual might be obligated to do.  Is a person obligated to save a drowning offspring?  Well, what does that have to do with war?  "Obligation" is every bit as abstract as is "just."  Trying to graft these words onto other concepts such as humane action or war or war excused by humane action just makes them more murky.  We decided nothing in our deliberations.  Surely we didn't hope to do otherwise.  We didn't even come close to defining a workable model for an obligation.  We did end in being dissatisfied, disappointed, and disgruntled.

 -- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #93 -- Legal/Moral

The term "legal" is most often miscarried when it has not been put in the light of a moral origin.  This relationship is the first puzzle of humanity.  Morals are abstract and difficult to pin down.  Artificial laws (legislation) are more or less successful attempts to make instances of moral behavior concrete.  I make a distinction between "artificial" and "natural" law.  Morals and natural laws co-exist.  Workable morals arise from natural law.  For example, when A kills B, B no longer participates.  There is no natural law for deciding who "should" participate.  There is only natural law for determining who, what, where, when, and how.  Therefore, no person can, by artifice, determine who "should" kill whom.

-- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #92 -- Weasel Words

What a rich week!  The wordsmiths of Sodom-on-the-Potomac have outdone themselves.  'Potential evidence' and 'strategic patience' debuted just a few days apart, both used in veiled threats of violence.  Syria and North Korea were the apples of the warmongers' eyes.  Beware of buzzwords.

-- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #91 -- Potential Evidence

Emitting from the gaseous hole that resides on the underside of the military-media complex, there is a new low in doublespeak.  I do not attribute this, but you can Google it in today's newsspace -- the phrase, potential evidence, gets such palaver as "The White House issued a stern warning to Syrian President Bashar Assad on Monday night as it claimed “potential” evidence that Syria was preparing for another chemical weapons attack." -- Associated Press attribution by a minor market TV source.  How craven?  How hunkered-down, fear-crazed pitiful?  Do the neo-cons in the deep state still believe that we are that stupid?  Certainly, they believe what they want to believe.  If we buy the concept of potential evidence, they will be right, and we humans will be lost.

-- Kilgore Forelle

Words Poorly Used #90 -- Words Used by Lawyers

In view of the recent surge of new persons of legal letters descending on Sodom-on-the-Potomac, perhaps we can stand on the shoulders of giants by reviewing a selection of notable quotations regarding the quarreling class.

It may be that the jury would incline to regard a practising lawyer as a man of probity whose word was prima facie worthy of belief. But the belief of lawyers in their own probity is not universally shared, and there are those who believe them to be capable of almost any chicanery or sharp practice.
-- Lord Bingham of Cornhill

We have the heaviest concentration of lawyers on Earth—one for every five-hundred Americans; three times as many as are in England, four times as many as are in West Germany, twenty-one times as many as there are in Japan. We have more litigation, but I am not sure that we have more justice. No resources of talent and training in our own society, even including the medical care, is more wastefully or unfairly distributed than legal skills. Ninety percent of our lawyers serve 10 percent of our people. We are over-lawyered and under-represented.
-- President Jimmy Carter

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
-- Robert Frost

The function of the lawyer is to preserve a sceptical relativism in a society hell-bent for absolutes. The worse the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be nothing but law and due process will be meticulously observed.
-- Grant Gilmore

Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.
-- H.L. Mencken

Let's ask ourselves: Does America really need 70 percent of the world's lawyers? Is it healthy for our economy to have 18 million new lawsuits coursing through the system annually? Is it right that people with disputes come up against staggering expense and delay?
-- Vice President Dan Quayle

A common and not necessarily apocryphal example portrays a solo practitioner starved for business in a small town. A second lawyer then arrives, and they both prosper.
-- Deborah L. Rhode

About half the practice of a decent lawyer consists of telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should stop.
-- Elihu Root

What are lawyers really? To me a lawyer is basically the person that knows the rules of the country. We're all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there's a problem, the lawyer is the only person that has actually read the inside of the top of the box.
-- Jerry Seinfeld

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
-- William Shakespeare

Is it not remarkable that the common repute which we all give to attorneys in the general is exactly opposite to that which every man gives to his own attorney in particular? Whom does anybody trust so implicitly as he trusts his own attorney? And yet is it not the case that the body of attorneys is supposed to be the most roguish body in existence?
-- Anthony Trollope

[Lawyers] can make the worse appear the better cause, as though they were fresh from Leontine schools, and have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent.
-- Oscar Wilde

An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for years or months. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.
-- Evelle J. Younger

When there are too many policemen, there can be no individual liberty, when there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice, and when there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace.
-- Lin Yutang

I do not say that all lawyers are bad, but I do maintain that the general tendency is bad: standing up in a court for whichever side has paid you, affecting warmth and conviction, and doing everything you can to win the case, whatever your private opinion may be, will soon dull any fine sense of honour. The mercenary soldier is not a valued creature, but at least he risks his life, whereas these men merely risk their next fee.
-- Patrick O'Brian

If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.
-- Charles Dickens

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.
-- Emma Goldman

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."
-- Franz Kafka

A good lawyer knows the law; a clever one takes the judge to lunch.
-- Mark Twain

The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure that it was drawn up by a lawyer.
-- Will Rogers

It is the trade of lawyers to question everything, yield nothing, and to talk by the hour
-- Thomas Jefferson

Lawyers enjoy a little mystery, you know. Why, if everybody came forward and told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth straight out, we should all retire to the workhouse.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
-- Benjamin Franklin

Lawyers are men whom we hire to protect us from lawyers.
-- Elbert Hubbard

I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
-- John Keats

There are three sorts of lawyers - able, unable and lamentable.
-- Robert Smith Surtees

The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.
-- Jeremy Bentham

A chief called Lawyer, because he was a great talker, took the lead in the council, and sold nearly all the Nez Perce country.
-- Chief Joseph

As a lawyer, as a private citizen, you see a lot of injustice. You see a lot of people who should have been punished and are not, and people who were punished wrongfully are not vindicated. Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.”
-- David Baldacci

A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.
-- Mario Puzo

The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer

I am sorry to say that sometimes matters of very small importance waste a good deal of precious time, by the long and repeated speeches and chicanery of gentlemen who will not wholly throw off the lawyer even in Congress.
-- William Whipple

An eminent lawyer cannot be a dishonest man. Tell me a man is dishonest, and I will answer he is no lawyer. He cannot be, because he is careless and reckless of justice; the law is not in his heart, is not the standard and rule of his conduct.
-- Daniel Webster

Of course, some would say if you have a performing inclination, then you should become a lawyer. That's a platform we use, or a priest. You know, anywhere you lecture and pontificate to people.
-- Rowan Atkinson

Maybe these gems will put you in a calmer frame of mind as we contemplate the perfect storm that is descending on the District. Special thanks to Wikiquote.org, AZQuotes.com, and IZQuotes.com

Words Poorly Used #89 -- Loyalty

Every definition of the word, loyalty, that I find suggests that the loyalty arises for cause.  Why do people who ask for loyalty seem to be holding a mental post-it note that adds "forever and in all events?"  Why did one minion want to qualify the idea by insisting on "honest loyalty?"  Was that an oxymoron to the requester?

-- Kilgore Forelle