Why... it can mean anything I want it to mean...

  
I’d like to draw upon the National Health Service for the weblog, this week.  Not because I’m sick of struggling with my latest WIP (ha ha), nor because preparing my book for release is a pain (ho ho – where does he get them from?) but because the NHS has provided me with a little language gem that they could only have found down a rabbit hole somewhere.

My wife is currently investigating why her mother, suffering from dementia and in need of twenty-four-hour-a-day care does not qualify for financial assistance under our new and improved system of health care in the U.K. and she came across a number of rulings that have been made in similar cases.  One of them caught my attention.  It owed something to Joseph Heller but more, I think to Lewis Carroll.  I quote directly from the claimant’s own account:

My grandmother has… complex and unpredictable care needs… including severe dementia, bowel and urinary incontinence, no mobility and is unable to reliably communicate - and she has been denied funding, on the basis that her self-neglect, violence, aggression and requirement for 24-hour supervision, although 'unpredictable', are not severe enough to warrant funding. The [NHS] Trust claims that her behaviour, although unpredictable, is predictable, because it is always unpredictable…

That word “Trust”, used nowadays to describe the mealy-mouthed, ill-educated, immoral, bean-counting shits who run hospitals these days, is another example of the language fascism, which now pervades public discourse in England; however, I shall let it pass for the sake of brevity.

Concentrate, instead, upon the assertion that if someone is always unpredictable, that makes their behaviour predictable and wonder at the mind, which thought that up and ask yourself why they aren’t creating marvelous alternative universe where language can mean whatever they want it to mean and making tons of money doing it.

Actually, I think we know why, don’t we?  It’s a good deal easier, not to mention far more lucrative, to employ such skills in the task of screwing money out of senile old ladies.