As someone who grew up relatively poor – we always had enough to eat but I got told no more frequently than yes when I asked “can you buy me…?”, often wore hand-me-down clothes from families who were friends with my grandmother, and sometimes my mother “made ends meet” by accidentally putting the gas company check in the electric company envelope and vice-versa – I was taught the value of money early on.

• Save your money for a rainy day; you never know when the car might breakdown.
• Be sure if you’re buying yourself a treat that you’ve got enough saved to cover that rainy day, and make sure you really want what you’re buying; it’s going to take you a while to save up enough to buy something else.
• Money is more fun to spend it big chunks; save to buy something you really want instead of wasting your cash on small, impulse purchases.

There’s a common thread here: Don’t spend more than you earn. Pay for necessities first, save something, no matter how little, in case something you hadn’t planned on comes up. Purchase consciously and in cash so that by the time you do get around to plunking down your money you’re absolutely sure that what you’re buying is something you really want. Pretty simple, right?

So why is it so many Americans can’t seem to grasp these basic concepts?

It seems a bit self-righteous to be writing this as someone who paid off her house and who is about to pay off her 60-month car loan in 30 months, but I’ve been watching the news coverage of the sub-prime meltdown and trying to learn more about the banking system and something in all the coverage smells funny to me. That something is typified by this headline from Alternet’s daily headlines mailing:

Debt Victims Resorting to Suicide

Debt victims? So even though I’m on track to work upwards of 60 hours this week I bit and followed the link to the article which begins:

Suicide Spreads as One Solution to the Debt Crisis

In a culture where credit rating is the key measure of self-worth, the increasing response to huge debts is “Just shoot me!”

A few days before Congress passed its Housing Bill, Carlene Balderrama of Taunton MA found her own solution to the housing crisis. Just a little over two hours in advance of the time her mortgage company, PHH Mortgage Corporation — may its name live in infamy — was to auction off her home, Balderrama killed herself with her husband’s rifle.

This is not the kind of response to hard times that James Grant had in mind when he wrote his July 19 Wall Street Journal essay entitled “Why No Outrage?” “One might infer from the lack of popular anger,” the famed Wall Street contrarian wrote, “that the credit crisis was God’s fault rather than the doing of the bankers and the rating agencies and the government’s snoozing watchdogs.” For contrast, he cites the spirited response to the depression of the 1890s, when lawyer/agitator Mary Lease stirred crowds with the message that “We want the accursed foreclosure system wiped out …. We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary”

Now, I get that a lot of things have changed since the ’70s when I was a kid. Gas is a whole lot more expensive for one thing. Thirty years ago my Mom could coast into a gas station in her eight-cylinder station wagon, ask the attendant for $2 worth of gas, and roll out with nearly half a tank. Food was a lot less expensive, I surmise, though truthfully I didn’t pay much attention to prices. I was just happy with my weekly treat of a can of SpaghettiOs.

Even though I am pretty solidly middle class, I can truly sympathize with folks who have difficulty making the rent, finding money to pay off health care bills, and end up having to put the credit card down for things like groceries. You do what you have to in order to survive. Sometimes the choices you make aren’t the smartest ones in the long term but are the ones that will ease the acute pain of the now the fastest. But there has to be some personal responsibility.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s article on Alternet, the article she quotes from The Wall Street Journal, and to a lesser extent James Scurlock’s excellent book Maxed Out: Hard Times in the Age of Easy Credit rightly blame the financial institutions that are the heartbeat of the American economy. Were it not for the greed of corporate entities, their desire for easy credit for themselves and high return on investment on the money they lent consumers, and the lack of oversight, indeed the coddling of these same businesses, by the government to the detriment of the electorate we would not be in the financial mess that we are in today. After all, if you don’t offer the products to someone they can not buy them. Yet, someone had to buy them.

Someone had to accept credit cards that offered limits that were way beyond their income capacity to pay off; someone had to sit down and sign mortgage papers that offered them introductory payments that anyone with third grade level math skills could see were way more than they could afford each month even before the intensely confusing adjustable rate and equity structure that was going to kick in after the first 6 months.

What surprises me about the mainstream media coverage of the financial meltdown we’re going through is not that the media are placing blame on the financial giants and the government but more that there is zero blame being placed on the debtor. When did we go from being a Puritanical country that prized image above all else – after all, even if your place in heaven or hell is already predestined you must act righteous so that everyone thinks you’re going to heaven – to one in which even though we manifestly contributed to our own misery we are in no way responsible for the state in which we find ourselves?

The credit card companies charge usurious interest rates, they raise those rates with no rhyme or reason and virtually no notice. Banks charge outrageous rates to allow you access to your own money (the average ATM transaction costs the bank between $0.04 and $0.06 cents yet they charge you a $3 fee; thank Ronald Reagan and his deregulation for that one). Mortgage brokers failed to explain balloon payments and interest-only loans and adjustable rates and sometimes even intimidated people into signing documents that they knew would be defaulted on. There is little incentive for someone who isn’t already rich to save or invest since, like buying, saving and investing are most rewarding in big chunks and lately interest rates only become attractive starting at the $10,000 mark. All of these things are true.

But victim implies that you are suffering the consequences of the actions of another that you had no hand in. Doesn’t acting on the desire to have more than you can pay for make you complicit in your own financial misery? And shouldn’t there be consequences for actions?

It feels shitty to ask questions like that when people are killing themselves to get their families out of debt but the reality is that because those questions aren’t getting asked, because no attention is being paid to the other parts of the solution – frugality, education, and temperance – to our financial problems even if some genius superstar economist finds a way to reform the banking system, make the credit card companies rein in their greed, and rectify how investment banks rate securities so that those ratings are based on their actual value not their potential value we will be right back where we started very soon, wondering where we’re going to sleep as the U.S. marshals watch the repo company cart our big screen TV out the door of the house we’ve just been evicted from because we couldn’t make the payments.

The standard of beauty prevailing in America for the past 60 or so years dictates that women’s bodies be completely hairless except for their heads and pubic areas, and even that has changed with the importation of hot waxing and the rise in popularity of the Brazilian [NSFW]. I find this fascinating given the ancestral breakdown in the United States in 2000 (pdf) and the hirsuteness of the various populations.

Despite Hitler’s protest to the contrary, Germany isn’t a country made up of blue-eyed blondes. Like most of the rest of the world, brunette dominates. It dominates through eight of the top ten most prevalent self-selected ancestries turned in during the 2000 census. Not being an evolutionary biologist I have no idea why dark hair dominates but simple observation proves that it is. And dark hair has a much greater chance of being thick, coarse, and persistent.

So because of this standard of beauty that requires women, and in the last decade increasingly men though I’ve little sympathy for the whining that has resulted from the pomo-metrosexual-gayification of male beauty standards – Eating disorders and the use of steroids are on the rise among men because there’s pressure for them to conform to an unrealistic body standard? Boo fucking hoo, guys. Welcome to the 21st century. You’ve got about 150 years of catching up to do; we’re going to start with the whale-bone jockstrap. – we spend a ton of money and go through enormous pain to alter our bodies.

Beauty is subjective. It’s also about 98% false. What society deems as beautiful involves hours of artifice and the assistance of dozens of expensive products (look, more stuff to buy!) just to sell a product – yourself – that doesn’t exist in nature. And unlike other products which don’t change their nature when you remove the packaging, you’re trying to alter something that is fundamentally prone to sliding toward its neutral, natural state.

What does it say about us as a species, then, that we’re willing to spend money on procedures that we know are painful and temporary to achieve an end – the acceptance of the product – that is based on artifice? All I have to say is that when a beauty procedure as a matter of course involves the application of antibiotic ointment it’s probably not something you should be doing. It’s certainly not something I’m ever going to do again.

From the BBC Day In Pictures:

Given that I can see 40 rushing toward me at great speed, I’m not surprised that my arms are finally getting to short.

I abuse my eyes by staring at a computer screen 8, 10, sometimes 12 hours a day, often not in the best light, and I further abuse them by reading rather a lot also not in the best light (Hey, Metro, buy some 60 watt bulbs for christ’s sake!).

What’s odd is that the idea of needing reading glasses doesn’t bother me as much as makes me wonder how I’m going to cope with the inconvenience. Perhaps it’s because I started wearing glasses when I was in college. Perhaps it’s because deep down I think they’ll enhance my sexy factor (what, chicks in glasses are hotter than average…usually).

Or perhaps, like the gray streak I have in the front it’s yet one more sign that I have survived thus far which is an achievement itself.

Though it could be argued otherwise, a case can be made for dubbing language humanity’s greatest achievement. True, the destructive power of the atom bomb is impressive, and the capacity to move about over great distances that the internal combustion engine provides is stunning in its affect on the sharing of knowledge, culture, and the mixing of the human genome. But language surpasses them both, and just about everything else, really, in both its mutability and its capacity to affect human decision making processes. What something means is, after all, the basis for all human decision making and with its power to clarify or obscure language becomes the key thing in all interactions.

Because language is such a powerful tool, I’m always troubled by linguistic dissembling. True, people use language in a variety of ways, and while there can be denotative and connotative definitions of words what troubles me most about linguistic dissembling is that the bulk of it passes unnoticed.

It should be said at this point that linguistic dissembling is distinct from lying. Lying is conveying one meaning when you know the opposite to be true. Linguistic dissembling is the concealing or diminishment of meaning through the imprecise use of words. Yes, I just made that up but it’s helpful to know what basis I’m working from here.

Take, for example, the potato salad we had with Saturday’s bar-b-que. Quite good, really; potatoes, carrots, celery, a little green pepper, mayo, and a little bit of mustard. Store bought potato salad the container for which was printed with the phrase “Quality Deli Salads from Giant,” Giant being the name of the grocery store chain. If you look in the Oxford English Dictionary (I used the U.S. edition), you’ll find the following definition:

quality

• noun (pl. qualities) 1 the degree of excellence of something as measured against other similar things. 2 general excellence. 3 a distinctive attribute or characteristic. 4 archaic high social standing.

– ORIGIN Latin qualitas, from qualis ‘of what kind, of such a kind’.

Now, it may seem like pedantry of the highest order to object to the way the word quality has been used in describing the potato salad, but bear with me for a moment.

In the way it has been used, quality has been transformed into an adjective; it describes “deli salads” which is clearly the subject of the sentence (and yes, it is a sentence). And connotatively, this use of quality as an adjective works: it implies that the deli salads from Giant will have general excellence when compared to deli salads from other providers. But linguistically, it’s dissembling.

The structure of the sentence, forcing a noun to stretch to denotatively do an adjective’s job, is a prime example of advertising speak. You’ve seen it. Short sentences that require you to fill in your knowledge of the brand or get you thinking about a product causing your memory to form a connection between that product and that slogan or bit of text so that the next time you’re in a store looking for a pair of shoes or searching for an alternative to the $9 bottle of wine you aren’t entirely sure won’t offend your host you will make that unconscious connection and go look for that pair of Nike shoes or that six pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

Very often advertising speak isn’t even really sentences. It’s phrases, clauses, words strung together to take up the shortest amount of space on a poster and capitalize on the fact that the human brain takes in color, shape, and text in that order when perceiving something visually. Advertising speak doesn’t really use the meaning of language to convey information but instead uses that meaning to make an association between a concept and a product, in short it builds a brand. Think about it for a second: if you’ve had any exposure to advertising at all in the past five years you probably have conceptual associations for each of the following brands:

• Nike
• Apple
• FedEx
• Coca Cola
• Dell
• Ikea
• McDonald’s
• Disney

Each one of those names brings up a feeling or lifestyle association. For example:

• Nike: Active, aggressive, individualistic
• Apple: Hip, cool, young, technologically advanced
• Dell: Reliable, affordable

and on, and on, and on. And while ad-speak is possibly the most deliberate example of linguistic dissembling, it’s really pretty harmless.

You have the capacity to resist the messages pushed on you by advertising. You can, for example, find out more about Nike’s practice of using sweatshop labor, or you could read about how Apple’s vertical management structure encourages an atmosphere of stomach-cramp inducing pressure among its workers, or you could just read Fast Food Nation and never eat at McDonald’s again (no, really, read it).

What advertising speak doesn’t do that other, more harmful linguistic dissembling does is narrow the connotative meaning of words to the point that they are no longer accurate in or are in direct conflict with their denotative definitions.

In its explanation of denotative and connotative definitions, the OED states:

…whereas denote refers to the literal, primary meaning of something, connote refers to other characteristics suggested or implied by that thing. Thus, one might say that a word like mother denotes ‘a woman who is a parent’ but connotes qualities such as protection and affection.

It is true that not all mothers provide affection and protection, many mothers do. Your connotative experience of mother may be neglectful, abusive, and irresponsible while mine may be loving, supportive, and reliable. The mere use of the word mother does not change its denotative definition (though one could argue that there’s a bit of linguistic dissembling happening by defining mother as “a woman who is a parent” as “parent” is one of those words that has different connotative meanings).

One vivid example of linguistic dissembling of the harmful type, and the example that was the catalyst for this essay, comes from a Washington Post Magazine article “Night and Day” which detailed how a woman named Jody Arlington formed both an identity and a life for herself after her older brother beat their parents and younger sister to death with a baseball bat in April 1984 when Jody was just 16 years-old.

The reporter, Laura Wexler, quotes of Arlington’s search for ways to cope with her grief and her guilt:

She [Arlington] immersed herself in the works of Primo Levi, Bruno Bettelheim and Elie Wiesel. “I was trying to understand the human psyche in extreme situations,” she says. “I saw that, given the right environment, we are all capable of terrible acts, but also great acts of courage and humanity.”

Now, I freely admit that this woman is speaking about her direct personal experience, and about an experience that had a significant effect in her life. Indeed, like any major trauma, it changed her life in ways so fundamental it’s virtually impossible to grasp its vastness. But let’s pick apart her statement for a second, “I saw that, given the right environment, we are all capable of terrible acts, but also great acts of courage and humanity.”

The linguistic dissembling occurs in the use of the word humanity as contrasted with “terrible acts.” Using humanity in this way implies that only characteristics dubbed as good – courage as specified by Arlington and by implication other qualities of the same ilk like kindness, compassion, and empathy – are human.

Are not those terrible acts committed by human beings? Is not the capacity to commit such terrible acts – death by beating, rape, genocide, other-species extinction – also a facet of humanity?

Why this type of linguistic dissembling, this narrowing of word connotation, is so dangerous is simply because it leads people to false conclusions. Human beings are capable of great acts of kindness, bravery, and charity but to ignore that we are also capable of great horrors perpetrated against ourselves and against the other inhabitants of the planet (by the way, the AP reported a couple of days ago that a major study shows that orangutans could be extinct as soon as 2011 all because palm oil is used in a multitude of snack and processed foods but also, largely, because it’s considered a viable ingredient in the biodiesel market) is to ignore a complete perception of humanity. Making judgments, then, based on this limited perception – i.e. that human equals only good qualities – is folly at its very best and potentially deadly at its worst.

The only way to combat this type of linguistic dissembling is to engage the brain, to ask why or what does that really mean when someone says something, to pull off the layers of assumption and, effectively, look behind the linguistic curtain.

You won’t be sorry you did…or maybe you will…but that’s another essay.