Further Update/Bonus: The "Con" in Lexicon--for the Person Who Asked to Advertise on My Blog

First part originally written back in 2006. For newest update, see dictionary below.
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You’ve heard it before, and you hear it everyday: language used in the goal to part us from our money (or other things).

“Save the rainforest” and “save the wetlands” gets people to send in money when they really mean “save the jungle” and “save the swamps.” They’re elaborate fundraising schemes—nobody in his or her right mind would pay to save a jungle or swamp, and from what? From someone else turning it into something more useful and profitable, that’s what.

“It’s not a purchase, it’s an investment” really means an investment in the salesman’s future job outlook.

Language, specifically crafted words, really do a number on us—when used effectively, they manipulate us into doing all kinds of things, but mostly part with some money. They soothe us, they conjure us, they try to paint a picture of a better way, or a better life. Utopia is a concept, not an actual place—otherwise we’d all already be there.

Politicians are clever wordsmiths (or at least their speechwriters are). Key words are thought to get votes: “environment”, “veterans”, “farmers”, “unions”, “pro-life”, “death tax”, or even attempting to speak Spanish. Whatever it takes to appeal to certain groups of voters gets loaded into a speech.

Marketers are another class of clever wordsmith: words like “fair trade”, “organic”, “natural”, or “sale”, or “grande triple mochaccino light whip”—all terms meant to appeal to buyers AND separate buyers into classes of susceptibility. Their art is to play on your emotions and render you helpless. None of it is verifiable on the spot, and you don’t know whether or not you really NEED it.

A classic: “a little old lady used to own this car, and she only drove it to church.” Yeah, sure she did—probably doing 70 mph, two states away. No, wait—that was her grandson during the week. Funny how we never hear of the grandson’s use between church visits, or how the car is really a casualty of Hurricane Katrina that got fixed up and auctioned off.

Persuasion is the language of the “con” artist—the lexi-“con” artist. All of it looks and sounds tempting, but none of it is verifiable. This is where detective work in the form of comparison comes in. The amount of detective work done will reveal another class of patron: one who cares about his money.

Case in point: a Starbuck’s menu board—the great separator without a single word spoken. The menu offers hot chocolate, cappuccino, café mocha, white chocolate mocha, and a 20 oz. cappuccino. Translated into “con speak”, this means “plain old hot chocolate”, “plain old cappuccino”, “mix hot chocolate with the cappuccino”, “use different powder for this one”, and “make mine larger.” See how much can be done with just three ingredients and a multitude of prices for each new combination? The customer is taken from $2.20 all the way to $3.40 (D.C. prices) for a beverage he has been thoroughly brainwashed into thinking is somehow special, and he can’t get it anywhere else or make it for himself at home. Even the paper cup has become a status symbol among commuters—it means “I had money and time to stand in line for this.” To me, it means, “I’m an idiot who wouldn’t know good coffee if it bit me on the leg, and Starbuck’s reeled me in good.” A simple transaction speaks volumes about both buyer and seller. Think about this next time you go to a Mexican restaurant—most of the menu items consist of the same handful of ingredients in a manipulated tortilla (either flat, rolled, or folded over). After scanning the menu, you see that all the items start blurring together in the same combination of ingredients served in a different configuration, yet the prices vary wildly for essentially the same item.

Are we the ultimate suckers or what?

A recent advertising campaign really brought the unspoken “con” home: the car ad that had drivers in expensive cars pulled over and shouting through megaphones such sayings as “because my daddy never hugged me”, and “the more men like me, the more I like myself” over and over. The ad dubbed these “ego emissions”, and they were dead on—so much of what people tend to buy are unspoken ego emissions. Anybody who can objectively look at purchases from a consumer standpoint can see this for themselves.

Psychology has gone from helper to enemy in the consumer world. At any time, anybody can make you believe anything—just look at Hitler and Stalin, media in general—television documentaries, the History Channel (which is riddled with inaccuracies, BTW), various activist groups, Lou Dobbs and CNN, invented film critics, inventful journalists like Jason Blair, Fox News, and book authors—any church, any community leader (or perceived leader), any teacher or professor, any ad with testimonials and before-and-after photos, any salesman worth his salt, PhotoShop software, and even bloggers. Anybody with any amount of influence and something to sell, whether it’s merchandise, a service, or an idea, will employ a lexi-“con” to lure you into doing something in their favor—parting with money or mind. There is even a whole science devoted to selling called “marketing”—just ask Donny Deutsch, host of the Big Idea.

Another good source for lexi-“cons” comes from George Carlin, who recently wrote the book, “When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?” In it, he describes how words are twisted and allowed to evolve into emotional events, depending on who the desired recipient is: “inheritance tax” becomes “death tax” and “shellshock” becomes “post-traumatic stress disorder.” These paint-by-number outlooks are engineered to maximize emotional response, especially near election time. Emotions are most needed at the polls and the malls.

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to separate fact from fiction, and don’t let the fiction bite you in the wallet. Go forth, consumers, and watch out for the lexi-“con” artists. Beware the power of persuasion and the science of selling in all its forms.

Now for the bonus: here’s a little ditty I’ve been working on for the last three years, and still can’t manage to get it filled in—it’s my very own Lexi-“con”-to-English dictionary.

The Marketer-to-Consumer Dictionary or How to Decipher a Lexi-“Con”

This is my attempt to put together a guide to help you translate the emotional bunk into something you can understand and avoid. Obviously I need help—if you can fill in some of the blanks, please leave a comment for your entry to be added.

A
“Awareness” campaigns: a way to collect money for PR purposes rather than the disease itself.

Antiwar: another word for “peace.”

Auction: a place where people who largely have no idea of worth and value go and bid up prices beyond market value for someone else’s stuff, serving to keep out competition.

B
Barista: overpaid, single-function waitress who pours disgusting coffee into prestigious paper cups, then disguises the taste with flavored syrups and whipped cream.

Black Friday: supposedly means the day when retailers finally get into the black for the year, but really refers to the mourning of consumer common sense.

C
Certified pre-owned: a piece of paper that certifies that yes, this car was pre-owned—a marketing gimmick supposedly to make the consumer less leery about buying a used vehicle.

Coupon: a piece of paper offering money off the price of a particular item that is nearly always the highest-priced-per-unit in it’s category. The piece of paper is enticement to get you to buy an otherwise over-priced, unnecessary item when perfectly good substitutes and cheaper alternatives are often right next to it on the shelf.


D
Door-to-door salesmen: beware these people, because chances are very good their wares aren’t fit for standard retail sale due to age or inferiority, legal reasons (banned or recalled by someone), legitimacy reasons (someone else’s cheap copy), or it may be a plain old-fashioned stolen item.

Deal: you have to ask, “for whom?” before partaking—what is advertised as a deal may really turn out to be a deal for the retailer and not you. Prices for that same item may have been lower in the past, or may be lower in the near future, but certainly aren’t right now. In fact, markups usually preceded any so-called “sale” or “deal.”

E
Environmentalist: someone who tries to play on your emotional heartstrings to get money or attention from you for a cause, whether it’s a legitimate one or not.

Ego emission: buying an expensive and prestigious, or wholly unnecessary item for the sake of ego.

F
Fair trade: supposedly a method of trade with suppliers who promise not to exploit children, the environment, or animals. It only serves to make the buyer happy to overpay while raising the supplier’s lifestyle up a couple of notches—the supplier has found a sucker.

Fee: another word for tax, charge, or surcharge.

Fair Tax: a clever scheme to enact a VAT tax on everything we buy. Its goal is to shove off tax payments and collections from the manufacturer and state to the retailer. See Value-added Tax.

G

H

I

J

K

L
Lexi-“con”: a con artist’s dictionary of words and phrases designed to help sell the consumer on his or her product, service, or ideal.

Liquidation sale: where a business goes out of business, and tries to sell off remaining inventory at supposedly low prices—what you DON’T know is that professional liquidators have come in and marked the prices back up to full retail before they start discounting. If you peel back the sticker on an item before buying, you can see for yourself. Those “discounts” are the LIQUIDATOR prices and not the company’s prices—quite often, you’ll find that the store’s last clearance price is half what the current liquidation price is.

Liquidation: another word for “we’re broke and need to sell this stuff quickly, but at not-too-low prices, and we pan on dragging this thing out for months with low discounts.”

Layaway: a clever storage program that makes tons of money for the retailers involved, because only about 2/3 of customers ever actually pay off their intended purchases and take them home. It's the same as renting an object while leaving it at the store.

M
Menu: a list of the same foods arranged in different configurations at different prices to see how high your “sucker” threshold is.

N
No-haggle pricing: a method used by car dealers to lure and reassure lilly-livered buyers into thinking they won’t overpay for a car, when the exact opposite is true. These dealers usually make about a 20% profit on cars, whereas regular dealers can make anywhere from 50% to 200% off the same car. Haggling is fighting for your purchasing power.

O
Organic non-food items: manufactured to make you feel better about jamming a landfill with disposable diapers, 100% recycled paper goods, all-cotton sanitary products, empty toothpaste tubes, used deodorant sticks, and plastic jugs full that once held biodegradable laundry detergent.

“Only”: when a sales pitch or marketing scheme includes the word “only”, it suggests that you are to compare the product in question to something else, only there IS nothing else to compare it to—either in the immediate area or on the retail market. Billy Mays is the king of “only” ads on TV. BEWARE OF THE WORD “ONLY”.

P
Promote: usually an ad campaign is used to promote something, or raise awareness for something--it's plain old marketing with different words to describe it. See "awareness campaign" above.

Q

R
Reprocessed: another term for “used and abused.”

Revenue: another word for “tax.”

Revenue enhancement: another term for “tax increase.”

Remodeled: a change in interior and/or ambience--often used as an excuse to charge higher prices.

Rebate: a piece of paper or printed offer essentially giving you your own money back on an item that was over-priced to begin with.

S
Sale: An old term to denote a price discount to attract buyers. Most of the time, the so-called “sale” is actually a temporary price increase.

Surcharge: another word for “tax” and is used interchangeably with “fee,” “revenue,” or “revenue enhancement.”

T
Tax: a state or federal cut of the total price of something. You're always paying for two or three when you buy anything.

U

V
Value-added tax (or VAT): From Wikipedia--Personal end-consumers of products and services cannot recover VAT on purchases, but businesses are able to recover VAT on the materials and services that they buy to make further supplies or services directly or indirectly sold to end-users. In this way, the total tax levied at each stage in the economic chain of supply is a constant fraction of the value added by a business to its products, and most of the cost of collecting the tax is borne by business, rather than by the state. VAT was invented because very high sales taxes and tariffs encourage cheating and smuggling. In other words, a sales tax like the Fair Tax structure--now you know where it comes from.

W

X

Y

Z

If that wasn't enough to dissuade you, try this: Choice vs. Privacy Invasion