I was interested to see in a story in The News & Observer this morning that welfare fraud apparently does not exist anymore (my emphasis added):
From the U.S. Postal Service to Facebook, county investigators are using a full range of tools to detect entitlement fraud – including almost $1 million in the past year.
Nonsensical decisions like this by editors and copy editors have always fascinated me. Nobody’s fooled by this. Welfare fraud is what it’s always been: welfare fraud.
It’s a term everyone knows and understands. Why change it and risk destroying that immediate understanding? Probably because someone called the newsroom and said they were offended. That’s all it takes these days. That is, unless you’re a conservative group, in which case the most derogatory term will suffice.
