Promiscuous Notoriety

The deadly swordsman with rapier wit, Inigo Montoya, in The Princess Bride, eventually became irritated enough with the continual use of "inconceivable" by the "mastermind" of their kidnapping caper to protest"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

This has nothing to do with my Post Title... or perhaps it does, because it is all to do with the right use of vocabulary.

In Germany and in America, an expression of deep indifference is worded: "I could care less" about the subject matter, or "I give a [slightly more vulgar synonym for fecal matter] about the topic or person."

The English use a double negative to express bottomless indifference, as in  "I could NOT care less" about the subject matter, or "I  DON'T give a [slightly more vulgar synonym for fecal matter] about the topic or person."

To my generation, which is admittedly older, "Notoriety" means "Ill-fame". To be notorious is--or was in my day-- to be well known for disreputable deeds, in other words, "famous for something bad".

It seems to me, nowadays, some folks cannot retain more than the first word in a phrase... and for goodness sake, the AI on this blog wants to use an apostrophe to denote a plural of "folks". I overrode it.

In the opposite direction, "promiscuous" almost always these days is taken to mean sexual incontinence (which might not be the dictionary definition... it is for Cambridge, which does not surprise me, but not for Merriam-Webster, which does surprise me.)

Did you know that one can eat "promiscuously"? Indiscriminate, casual, irregular are official synonyms.

Bears and raccoons might be said to eat "promiscuously".

I wonder whether, by now, I have bored the bots that put human moderators out of a job. Assuming so, I will point out that what almost every malicious email has in common (apart from the German ones from dot de) appear to be sent from a gmail address. 

Mostly, they come with a stream of numerals as the subject line, or they allege "Order Confirmation" or "Invoice" or "Thank you for your payment". Some get by the spam filters, some don't. But, what they almost all the names are fake, why is that? Hover your cursor over Pamela, and you will find that is not the name on

the sending account. Ditto for Dean or Teddy or Marilyn or Gladys or Jeffrey or Frank or James or Jonas.

If the wizards behind the curtain can know when a woman is pregnant before she buys her test kit, why don't they know who is behind these email accounts?

Transunion has been breached. So far, they say 4.4 million Americans are affected, with social security numbers, credit cards, and more distributed to the dark web. Google's breach allegedly affected 2.5 billion people, AT&T and Verizon have been breached, also Intel, also dozens of health care databases... so much for HIPPA laws...  With Social Security numbers no longer secret, it seems like the numbers no longer identify anyone or guarantee anything.

They say AI saves time. Maybe in a medical or scientific setting, it might, but look at the impossible amount of time regular people are now expected to spend monitoring statements of all kinds as a result of a stranger checking private emails on a work computer.

Unfortunately, one cannot opt out of databases such as the four credit report bureaus, of which Transunion is one, but either Equifax or Experian was breached a few years ago. One also cannot opt out of data brokers. Freeze your credit. It's free to do. Write to your congress persons to demand that major purchases (home title changes, copyright assignments) must not only be notarized but be apostilled by the Secretary of State.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry