Wednesday, March 11, 2009

"Too Big to Fail" - Another Case of Language Abuse

Our government officials love to abuse English in order to confuse people's minds. The top offenders in the Bush years were "War on Terror" and "misunderestimate." The offender of these days is "Too big to fail," which was broadly used by members of the Obama administration, and shamelessly taken up by the media, to describe business entities that need taxpayers to bail them out. In fact, entities that are "too big to fail" need no bailouts, because they will never fail: that is the meaning of this peculiar phrase. An accurate description of businesses to which government and media are referring would be that they are "too big to let fail." This is not only grammatically correct, it will also clarify the current economic situation, which our officials and media seem keen to keep murky.

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