To the Editor:
Whatever the intent, there is a word or phrase to serve it. Often the public believes itself misled by the wording in various bills. For example, when a phone company charges Joe to make and receive calls, Joe feels he has incurred fees but the phone company describes them as “services.”
If, on a Friday night, one wishes to go to a club where a loud band is playing, outside the club’s door there is a sign stating a “$10 cover charge” but down the street where the musicians and patrons are quiet, inside on the wall there is a brief announcement “management requests a $10 gratuity.”
In an advertisement showing a spatula-holding mother inviting her husky daughter to consume fat-packed cookies, health minded observers would regard this as an “unwise gesture” but the advertiser would call it an “expression of love.”
Let this summary not be ended without a visit to the garden of deceptive terms – the law. Were you to allow your puppy to bark through the front door at your passing neighbor, you might soon thereafter receive a letter filled with zeroes from his attorney. After reading it though, you might conclude, according to Webster’s Dictionary, that the writing is “attempted extortion.” However, in legal terminology it is merely “a request to reach an amicable settlement.”
Cape May – The number one reason I didn’t vote for Donald Trump was January 6th and I found it incredibly sad that so many Americans turned their back on what happened that day when voting. I respect that the…
