The Unemployed Philosophers Guild sells a lot of hip swag with clever titles that you can use to make people think that you are educated. A friend once gave me a mug from them on which a world map was painted. When you poured warm liquid into the cup, the map would change to reflect what the world will look like in a hundred-plus years. Houston and most of Florida were under water (well – it’s not all bad). Manhattan was kept dry by an elaborate series of dikes. Most of the Pacific coast of the US west of the major fault lines had slipped into the ocean.
A month after I was given the cup, in an attempt to remove a stubborn coffee stain with brillo, my wife scrubbed the painting off. In one stroke, she solved the problem of global heating, just like that. She is a brilliant woman – but modest enough to admit that she was stupid enough to marry me.
The people who run the Unemployed Philosophers Guild have monetized the fact that “-ment” is a common derivational morpheme in English. You can buy Impeachmints (cheap mints that come in a tin box with Trump’s picture on it), Judgmints (RBG), Empowermints (Rosie the Riveter), Encouragemints (Mr. Rogers), Enlightenmints (Buddha), Retiremints (American Gothic), Shakespearmints, Enchantmints (Alice in Wonderland), and Nineteenth Amendmints (Susan B. Anthony). You can also buy mints that come in a box labelled “Dilithium Crystals” – but that is a digression.
The origin of the English “-ment” morpheme stumped me. A quick Google search showed that the English ‘-ment’ comes from the French ‘-ment’, which, in turn, comes from the Latin “-mentum”. The trail runs dry after that. ‘Mentum”, as a stand-alone noun, means “chin” in Latin, but I doubt that a nominalizing morpheme comes from the word for a secondary facial feature. My initial instinct was that the suffix is somehow related to the Indo-European *mn (memory, mind – Lat. ‘mens’, Skt ‘mantra’, Cz ‘myslit’, Gk. mnemesis, NE ‘memory’, ‘mind’). A former professor pointed me to a book called – you guessed it – Latin Suffixal Derivatives in English and Their Indo-European Ancestry, by a guy named D. Gary Miller (Oxford, 2006). The former professor was also kind enough to send me a PDF of the book and to give me the page cite. Here is what Professor Miller has to say about the -ment morpheme:
3.5 -men-tum (> E-ment(um)) ‘means, instrument, result’ Historically, -mentum is sometimes considered an enlargement of -men of Indo-European date (LG i. 371). As mentioned in § 3.4, numerous doublets existed, such as reg-i-men/reg-i-mentum ‘rule’. Syntactically, however, -mentum shares more with Gk -ma.-mat from *-mn ˚ (-mn ˚ -t-) (IEL 209), than with L-men (Sandoz 1994: 328). Apart from rare deadjectivals, such as rudıımentum RUDIMENT [1548](rudis ‘unwrought; crude; RUDE’), most of the examples are deverbal. On elementum ELEMENT, see elementary (§4.4.2)
So- the ‘mentum’ here means “means, instrument, result”, rather than “chin”. I would like to know more about the etymology of the Latin morpheme (admittedly, I do not understand whether Professor Miller’s explanation says that this Latin “mentum”, ‘means, instrument, result’ comes from the Indo-European *mn, ‘memory, mind’, but that is the lectio facilior), but that did bring me at least one step closer to the answer. Professor Miller finishes his discussion of the “-ment” morpheme as follows:
The major domain of -ment is to verbs in -ish: accomplishment, admonishment, banishment, blandishment, establishment, nourishment, punishment, refurbishment, etc. But even here, -ment occasionally yields to other suffixes, e.g. diminishment to diminution, distinguishment to distinction, publishment to publication (Bauer 2001: 138).
-but every native speaker knows that.
Per earlier posts, everything – Indo-European morphology, game theory, public policy, psychology, derivatives, financial modelling – eventually passes through the needle’s eye of New York State mobile home park management. To my knowledge, the Unemployed Philosophers Guild does not sell Entitlemints. If they did, they would probably come in a box with a picture of a Social Security check, a Medicaid payment, or a food stamp. I would like to talk about a different kind of entitlement, i.e. legal ownership of mobile homes. If you buy a park from a mom-and-pop, chances are their titles will be a mess. If you want to run the park right, you will need to straighten that mess out.
In New York State, mobile homes manufactured prior to 1995 do not have titles. Ownership passes by means of a bill of sale. For these purposes, a bill of sale is simply a note saying something to the effect that “I, Seller, resident at X address, hereby sell this home (make, model, date, size, location, serial number) to Buyer, resident at Y address for Z consideration, subject to the following warranties (if any)”. The note should be signed by both parties. Although the signatures do not need to be notarized, the document will hold up better in court if they are. As a best practice, if you buy a pre-1995 mobile home, you should ask for a chain of bills of sale going back to the manufacturer – but you will rarely get that. A properly-executed and notarized bill of sale from the current owner is usually sufficient.
Post 1994 homes are a different animal. For each home manufactured in 1995 and thereafter, the DMV issues a title, same as they would for a car, a truck, a trailer, a motorcycle, or a motorboat. When a licensed mobile home dealer purchases a home from the manufacturer, the manufacturer provides the dealer with a Manufacturer’s Certificate of Origin. (the “MCO”). When the dealer sells the home to the first retail owner, the dealer provides the customer with the MCO; the customer then sends the MCO in to the DMV, along with a completed and executed Form MV-82TON, Application for Title. Assuming the people who run the title bureau in Albany don’t spill coffee on it or feed it to their pet bearded dragons, the DMV then sends the owner a title, and chain of ownership for the home is born. Ownership is transferred to a new buyer when the first owner and the purchaser both sign the back of the title. Liens are recorded with the DMV, and a notice of each lien is printed on the title. If a lender repossesses a mobile home, the lender can sell the home to a prospective buyer by signing the back of the title and providing the buyer with a Form MV-950, Affirmation of Repossession and Bill of Sale. The Form MV-950 effectively informs the DMV that the home has been repossessed and explains to the DMV why the lender, rather than the owner of the home listed on the front of the title, has signed the back.
I have written earlier about title issues. Joe Gurry sold a pre-1995 home that I rented to him to an unsuspecting older woman who did not think to ask Joe to prove that he owned the asset that he sold her. For a while, I and one of my competitors thought that we had both bought the same home. These problems turned out to be solvable. The amount the old lady paid Joe Gurry was enough to make me whole and to make him go away. After I coughed up back lot rent on the repo home that was sitting on my competitor’s lot, they agreed to let me have the home.[1] I want to write here about another case of entitle-mints that I last mentioned in September. There is a solution under the law for the problem that that case presents. But this is not a story about title law. It is a story about psychology. Title law is not nearly as convoluted as the human psyche.
When I bought that park, I acceded to seven park-owned homes and three notes. Each of the notes was a purchase-money loan that was secured by a home in the park. Two of the note issuers have moved out; one remains. I will call that family the Balboas. The Balboas don’t have clear title to their home. When the former park owner sold the Balboas their home, he took back a note secured by the home, but he did not sign the title over to them. Effectively, they took out a loan in exchange for bupkis. This came to my attention about a year ago. I asked Mr. Balboa whether he had title to the home. He said that he had just gotten ‘loan papers’ from the former owner. His wife, Adrian, confirmed that.
The former owner of a park was a partnership between a father and a son. The father had taken the son into the business around 2015. He had sold the home to the Balboas the previous year. They had decided to sell the park to me in 2018 because the son wanted to focus on other businesses and the father had heart problems and was beginning to show signs of dementia. I had happened to call them to ask if they wanted to sell their park at just the right moment. We have remained friendly since the closing.
So – in the summer of 2020, I asked Matt, the son, whether he had any records of the sale of the home to the Balboas. He told me that his father did have a record of the sale, but that I would have to come up to Syracuse to pick up the file. He did not want to send it thru the mail, because it contained the title to the home. So, I took a ride up. When I found him, he was pouring a pad for a block of self-storage units that would expand his already-existing self-storage facility next to I-81. He grinned when he showed me how he could lock out customers who don’t pay. Very different from the residential rental business, where your legal remedies are constricted even in good times. It was unclear whether the grin was satisfaction about the new business or schadenfreude. He said,
-You can’t do that with a mobile home or an apartment.
I wanted to change the subject.
-How’s your father?
-He’s gone downhill. All he does now is tinker with an old truck in the garage. He never leaves the house.
-What about your mother?
-Same.
-Your father’s a funny guy. Give him my best.
Matt gestured to the folder.
-He didn’t get an Affirmation of Repossession. That’s all we have.
-It is what it is.
-Yes, it is.
When we pulled out of the parking lot, my wife remarked loudly that Matt had a Trump 2020 bumper sticker on his truck and said, “Yuck”. I said, “SHHHH” and told her to keep her political opinions to herself until we were out of earshot.
The folder contained a Pennsylvania title that had been signed over to Matt and his father, Sam,’s dealer entity by a bank called Greentree Consumer Discount (“Greentree”), which had seized the home from its original owner in a repossession action. In an ordinary course of events, I would contact Greentree, find the person who is responsible for their portfolio of mortgage loans, and get that person to give me a belated Affirmation of Repossession and Bill of Sale. The problem was that Greentree had gone bankrupt in 2016. When that happened, the bankrupt entity’s assets were purchased by a company named Ditech. Ditech went bankrupt in late 2018. After some research, I learned that, since the Ditech bankruptcy, legacy Greentree assets have been serviced by another entity called NewRez LLC (“NewRez”). I was able to find a general phone number and email address for NewRez, but I was unable to find out what legal entity owned these assets, and I was unable to find out anyone at NewRez who could issue an Affirmation of Repossession and Bill of Sale. As for the parties who had been on the other side of the 2014 transaction, Matt and Sam had dissolved the legal entity that had purchased the home and Sam, the guy who bought the repoed home in 2014, was no longer compos mentis.
The good news is that there is a solution for cock-ups of this type. I faced a similar issue shortly after I bought the park in northern New York. In late 2018, a tenant offered to sell me a post-1994 home in that park at a deep discount. He had purchased the home from another tenant, who had purchased it from someone else, who had, in turn, purchased it from Sam. The home did not have a title because the first buyer had never sent in the MCO. In a situation like this, the procedure is to fill out an application for a title, include all of documents that you do have, if possible get an affidavit from the seller explaining why he or she does not have a title (or prove that you tried to obtain same), and send the package in to Albany with a cover letter explaining why you do not have a title, what you have supplied, and why the package should be sufficient. This makes it easy for the applicable bureaucrat to issue the title without sticking their neck out or breathing too hard. I have done it twice, and it has worked both times.
So – I told the Balboas that I would help them get title to their home, and I prepared a package to be sent to Albany. I wrote a nice cover letter to the DMV explaining how the transaction happened, why there was no Affirmation of Repossession and Bill of Sale, why the signature on the title was dated 2014, and why I needed to put a lien on the new title. To make sure that I was not blowing smoke up anyone’s bung-hole, I added a signature line for me and also one each for Adrian and her husband. I filled out an MV-TON to the extent that I could and marked the places where the Balboas had to fill out their personal information and sign. I filled out and signed an application for a lien and marked where they had to sign that. I included corporate documents to show that I had the power to sign for my dealer entity. Finally, I included a check to cover the $125 title fee and another to cover the $5 lien-filing fee. To make the process idiot-proof, I included two stamped addressed envelopes (one to the title-processing division, one to the lien-filing division) and filled out and paid the certified mailing receipts. I put all of these into an envelope which I mailed, certified mail, to Mike with the instructions, “Get the Balboas to sign this”.
That was in December. It is now May. The weather has been beautiful for the past week, but the title to the Balboas’ home is still clouded because they refuse to sign the title application.
I suspect that part of the problem is that Mike does not understand the importance of legal certainty. He builds houses. He is more concerned with shitty infrastructure, like Orangeburg pipe and leaky water lines, than he is with paperwork. By contrast, I get sweaty palms when I am confronted by legal uncertainty, like when I don’t know who owns what in the park. Mike told me that the first time he asked the Balboas to sign, they told him that they would not do so because they were having marital problems, and that they would do so after they divided their assets. Then they reconciled, but they still refused to sign the papers. I was up there last week, so I decided to help them put a fork in this. I spent a few days knocking on their door, watching their cats climb in and out of a chicken-wire cage that Mr. Balboa has built into one of the windows and sitting in their living room chatting with Adrian while their kids acted like, well, toddlers. They still have not signed. Excuses ranged from, “We are never here at the same time” (You don’t have to sign at the same time) to, “Mr. Balboa is not here because he is putting up sheetrock for his sister” (Give me the sister’s address. I will drive there), to “Well – he’s not here, so only one signature won’t do you any good” (Yeah- but it’s a fucking start). The real issue is that they do not want to sign because they think that I am trying to put something over on them. Here is the last text I received from Adrian, after all of her other excuses had expired:
“I guess Mr. Balboa’s mom wants to have her lawyer take a look at them bc something seems off to her. N she can’t do that till Monday”
And here’s my response:
“Of course you can have your lawyer look at it. If they, you or your mother are uncomfortable with it in any way, please have them call me directly. But let’s stick a fork in this next week. This has been going on since December.”
This is a rare instance where a mobile home park owner is acting altruistically. Until they sign this paperwork, they do not own the home. They can’t sell it and they can’t move it out of the park if they buy land. If they destroy it, I can sue them for destroying my property. I want them to have title to the home because they were taken advantage of by Sam, and I feel obliged to clean up Sam’s mess. They have nothing to lose by signing, and quite a bit to gain. I, on the other hand, will only gain legal certainty.[2] Seeing me act like this seems to cause crippling cognitive dissonance.
Over the course of Breaking Bad, certain phrases recur in contexts that make you see the elephant from more than one angle. For example, a small boy hears the imperative phrase ‘Bounce!’, meaning, ‘Get lost!’, ‘Scram!’ or, in Boston, ‘Screw!’ from an older guy, and he re-uses it shortly before he is killed. Walter is told by one of his mentors (Mike Ehrmantraut, I believe), “You need to learn to take ‘yes’ as an answer”, which he then uses in another context. That is the phrase we need here and now. Adrian and her husband need to learn to take ‘yes’ for an answer. I can follow up with them and use logos, pathos and ethos to try to persuade them that I really am just trying to help, but I think that the idea that the owner of the park is not somehow, somewhere, trying to screw them has their Spidey senses tingling.
+++++++++++++++++
Update Here’s an email I received from Mike yesterday. I had asked him to follow up with the Balboa’s re the above-referenced :
Balboa said they won’t sign it and where told not to by there lawyer…I talked to Mr. Balboa yesterday.
I am curious how a competent lawyer could give that advice, but I know that the chance that they will let me speak with their attorney is zero to none, and I would have nothing to gain from such a conversation other than the satisfaction of shaking my head at the sorry state of the legal profession in early twenty-first century America. So I apologized to Mike for the extra administrative scut-task and asked him to send me the paperwork certified mail as soon as he could. I will put the title in the park’s name, and I will let the Balboas know that I will sign the home that they bought in 2014 over to them upon request. They are on their own now. We have spent enough energy trying to prevent them from shooting themselves in the foot.
[1] After I sold the home, I ended up about $15,000 in the hole. That is still a good deal for me, because by selling the home in place, I obtained the right to the stream of lot rent payments. See earlier posts re how to value an empty lot.
[2] I do not think that signing the lien application would be to their detriment. The note already gives me a security interest in the home. If a title had been issued, I would need to perfect my security interest by putting a lien on the title, but since I now have possession of the old, signed-over title now, I think that I already have a de facto lien – so they would lose nothing by agreeing to have the lien recorded on the new title.