Unless you have read The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax,[1] Eskimo Words for Snow,[2] or Stephen A. Jacobson’s Yup’ik Eskimo Dictionary,[3] or are a native speaker of Inuit or Yup’ik, you probably think that the Inuit have a limitless number of words for snow. That is bunk.[4] Yup’ik has rich derivational and inflectional morphology.[5] There is a small number of stem morphemes that can mean ‘snow’, or ‘snow’-related items.[6] The list of these stem morphemes is about as long as the list of English words for snow and snow-like phenomena e.g., ‘snow’, ‘slush’, ‘blizzard’, ‘bank’, ‘sleet’, ‘hail’, usw.[7] If you run those stems through the Yup’ik morphological sausage grinder, of course you end up with a long open-ended list of morphological permutations, but that doesn’t mean that the environment in which the Inuit live has changed their inner lives in such a way that they need more words for snow that we do. It means that their language has rich morphology. You could apply the same morphological processes to the Yup’ik words for, say, garbanzo beans, four-by-fours, Gaco, welfare checks, payment plans, hot springs, arbitrage, implied volatility, petroleum jelly or casual sex, but that would prove too much.[8]
There is always a temptation to say that ‘X have a million terms for Y‘. The Irish have a million terms for bunking off. The French have a million names for Camembert. The Czechs have a million words for loose women. Texans have a million ways of saying ‘Oklahoman’. If you want to evaluate these claims, I believe, you should proceed empirically.
The term for ‘grifter’ in Mandarin is ‘pianzi’. Although the pinyin transcription looks like the English word ‘piano’, it is pronounced [pyen-dze], with a falling intonation on the first syllable. It is a portmanteau of the root pian (falling tone), which means ‘to cheat or con’ and ‘zi’, which is linked etymologically to the noun that means ‘seed’, but in this case is a morpheme that means ‘guy-who-does’. A xiazi is a guy who is blind. A bozi is a guy who is crippled. A pianzi is a guy who does cons.
I don’t know whether Mandarin has a lot of terms for grifters. There are, certainly, plenty of grifters in Mainland China and plenty, although marginally fewer, in Taiwan. Some even serve in the government, on both sides of the Strait. Regardless of whether the term implicates the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, pianzi has a rhetorical heft that I like. The phonetics are high, unrounded, sibilant and economical, and the semantics are to the point. What does that high-front-hissing-sound-guy do? When he is working, he grifts. He works all the time, because he does not have a family or hobbies. He just grifts.
I would like to say that mobile home park owners have a million words for pianzi, but we are a mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, unimaginative bunch. Our vocabulary is no richer than anyone else’s. I would also like to say that we deal with grifters more often than most people, but that is not true. Tax lawyers bilk the government. McKinsey consultants steal your watch and bill you for telling you the time. Grift is no more noticeable to people who work on Wall Street than water is to fish.
Most of the grifts that park owners run into are low-level. Residents who pay in cash and say that they are short because the bills they gave you stuck together. People who sell the appliances in a park owned home and then moan about the warranty of habitability. Emotional support pitbulls. Women who claim to be in Tennessee, Alabama and Saint Lawrence County, New York, simultaneously.
But that’s the usual stuff.
Three times every two years, I receive an official-looking form that says that one of my legal entities needs to file its biennial registration statement. In order to do that, the form says, I should fill out the form and send it with a check for $150 to an entity named C.P.S., at an address in Albany. The form is printed in governmentally-dismal black-and-white and the instructions are in English on the front side and Spanish on the back. Buried in the middle of the form, in a type font no larger than that used for the rest of the content, is a message that says that C.P.S. is not a government agency and does not have a contract with any governmental agency to provide this service.
(This happens three times every two years because I have three legal entities, that is, two land-owning entities and a management company. If I were to do things according to Hoyle, I would have four legal entities, i.e. two land-owning entities, a management company, and a home-owning entity. Since the early nineteenth century, American courts and legislatures have limited the liability of shareholders in corporations to the amount of their investment regardless of the extent of claims against the corporation except in exceptional, abusive situations that justify ‘piercing the corporate veil’. The policy goal behind this was to encourage risk-taking of a type that was believed to be beneficial to the development of the country. In order to lessen the risk that tort or contract claimants can attach the land owned by a mobile home park business, every MHP owner should put the risk-creating activities, i.e. management and POH ownership, into legal entities separate from the entities which own the business’s most valuable asset, the land. I believe that owners of apartment buildings engage in similar business planning, without the use of a home-owning entity.)
When you form a corporation or a limited liability company in New York State, you need to file a bunch of paperwork with the Secretary of State (Not that Secretary of State – the one in Albany), advertise the formation of the entity, and recite a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo. After that is done, the entity exists s a legal fiction separate from you and, provided you observe corporate formalities and do not use the corporate form cynically or fraudulently, you should not be held liable personally for claims against the corporation. Every two years, you need to renew the entity filing.
That’s what C.P.S. claims to help you with.
If you fill out the C.P.S. form and send it to them with your $150 check, they will renew your legal entity filing for you. The thing is – you can renew it yourself by going to the Department of State’s website directly. It is simple to do and it costs $9. If you don’t have access to a Web browser, you can mail in a simple form with a $9 check.
That’s right – C.P.S. can handle your biennial renewal needs, but they don’t add any value and they charge a 1,567% mark-up.
I don’t know what the name C.P.S. stands for. Consummate Ponzi Scheme? Come Play, Sucker? The services that it provides are as much bunco as claims that the Eskimos have 999,999 words for snow. The person or people who founded it are a bunch of pianzi. That said, I am not sure whether they can be held legally liable for what they do. If C.P.S. were accused of fraud, their first line of defense would be to claim that the entity did not commit fraud because, buried in the text in the form that they send out, is a sentence saying that C.P.S. is not a governmental agency. My inclination is that, although this is true, and although that particular sentence is printed in all caps, the way the message is delivered is still misleading, because the message is buried in the middle of a bunch of glaze-my-eyes text. The second line of defense would be that, even if the legal entity C.P.S. engaged in fraud, the corporate veil should not be pierced because the owners of C.P.S. – the pianzi – are separate from the legal entity. They have observed corporate formalities and they have not used the corporate form fraudulently. Because of that, they should not be held personally liable for claims against the entity. The last claim cuts the baloney quite thin – effectively, it says that, although the activity that the legal entity engaged in was fraudulent, the owners of the legal entity were honest about the fact that they set up a corporation to defraud people and did not use the corporate form fraudulently. I, personally, would have trouble keeping a straight face as I made that argument, but I will leave this one to the first-year associates who can research the law and to the litigators.
Regardless of the legal rights and liabilities – if you receive a form from C.P.S. asking for money to renew your LLC filing, don’t fill it out. Wrap some fish with it. Tell your friends to do likewise.
A musician friend of mine signs off his emails with the Hunter Thompson quote, “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” I do not doubt that that is true of the music business, but it is true of many other businesses, too. There are pianzi everywhere.
[1] Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, University of Chicago Press, 1991.
[2] Lauran Martin, Eskimo Words for Snow; A Case Study in the Genesis and Decay of an Anthropological Example, American Anthropologist 88, 2, 418-23.
[3] Stephen A. Jacobson, Yup’ik Eskimo Dictionary, Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks 2012.
[4] Id.
[5] Id.
[6] Id.
[7] Id.
[8] The how-many-words-are-there gets muddied beyond the issue of what is a word. For example, per Tony Woodbury, as reported by Pullum, the term igluksaq has been translated as ‘snow for igloo-making’. However, it is composed of the morpheme iglu, which means ‘house’, and -ksaq, which means ‘material for’. To the extent that a house is made out of two-by-fours, igluksaq could mean ‘two-by-four’. Id.