The correct answer to the following quiz could be worth $11 million. All you have to do is interpret the meaning of this sentence, which was printed in bold letters at the top of a mailing received by a Florida woman named Ina Brown. Here’s the sentence: Ina Brown, you stand alone at the top–you’ve swept past 200,000 other winners with our first $11,075,000 prize in history.
Did you assume that this could be the winning letter in one of those publisher sweepstakes? After all, it doesn’t say “you may already be a winner.” It says, “you stand alone at the top,” which is usually where the winner stands. When Brown, 76, found out she wasn’t an honest-to-goodness winner, she sued American Family Publishers.
David Carlin, a lawyer for the publisher, defended the misleading mailing, saying in a New York Times interview that “most people understand these mailings.” What Carlin is really saying is that everybody knows you can’t trust what a company puts in print to be what it really means. He’s acknowledging the death of the old social contract whereby words had meanings similar to those listed in a dictionary or defined by a reasonable 12-year-old.
A society that places no value on the common meaning of words is a dangerous place to live. It’s a place where the National Enquirer is a viable alternative to The New York Times. Where people tape record their private conversations with friends. Where presidents deny things first in the present tense, then later categorically. Where AT&T has to spend millions to have Paul Reiser convince us that there really are no catches to AT&T’s really simple offer, really. Honest. Where the CEOs of tobacco companies spend years telling us there is no evidence that tobacco is addictive when anyone who has smoked for a week knows better. Have we come to be part of society where the capitol is the courtroom and the religion is litigation?
The fleecing of our language has reached an insidious level. In politics, we call it spin. Cable programs provide forums for spin doctors practically around the clock. In law, we call it legalese, that jargon meant to obscure and complicate the simplest transactions. In commerce, we call it fine print. And we even have a punctuation mark reserved exclusively to announce that the words you just read may not mean what you think they do: the asterisk.
There’s another lawsuit being brought in Florida besides Ina Brown’s. It’s a class-action suit asking $15,000 in damages per mailing, making American Family Publishers liable for as much as $300 billion in Florida alone. This may be a bit excessive for selling false hope to the naive. But it sounds about right for aiding and abetting the destruction of the social contract by which a civilized society operates.
