‘-ster’ing the pot with suffixes

JUNE CASAGRANDE

This week’s column begins with a little quiz.

A Nigerian fraudster is:

(a) a breed of sheep dog.

(b) a play in lawn bowling in which a shooter attempts to fake out

the goalie.

(c) the person who pilfered my name, address and Social Security

Number through ChoicePoint.

2. True or false: No one cares about the subjunctive mood anymore.

If you answered D to these questions, you should wait to read the

paper until after you’ve had your morning coffee.

If, on the other hand, you chose C for the first question, then

perhaps you too received a letter this week from ChoicePoint.

An official of ChoicePoint, which has been making headlines for

having leaked 145,000 people’s Social Security numbers to criminals,

sent me a second letter this week. This note was to follow up an

earlier letter warning me that my information may have been stolen.

The follow-up note contained much happier news.

The ChoicePoint official wanted to let me know that a “Nigerian

fraudster” has pleaded no contest to charges of stealing this

information. The whole thing had a sort of case-closed, we-got-the-

bad-guy-so- you’re-out-of-danger ring to it. Very upbeat. And I was

so dazzled by the unusual and beautiful choice of words that I almost

missed a newspaper article that same day that mentioned that a whole

ring of criminals from Nigeria, not a lone “fraudster,” had been

involved. They got one guy, but others who had access to my Social

Security number are still running around out there.

I checked with the credit bureaus and no one has yet attempted to

use my name and Social Security number, but who knows what tricksters

these other fraudsters might turn out to be.

My favorite thing about prefixes and suffixes is that they give

you full license to make up words that don’t exist. And, indeed

“-ster” is listed in Webster’s as a legitimate suffix: 1. a person

who is, does, or creates (something specified): often derogatory

[oldster, punster, rhymester, trickster]; 2. a person associated with

(something specified) [gangster].

In Webster’s view, puns and rhymes are crimes on par with

racketeering and murder. In the view of Los Angeles Times’ Pulitzer

Prize-winning business writer Michael Hiltzik, ChoicePoint is a

scamster on par with the very criminals who they claim victimized

them.

The president of ChoicePoint, whose business is selling your

information and mine to parties it deems legitimate, denied that

sensitive information had been stolen from it in the past. But in

2002, a ring of identity thieves from Nigeria managed to wrangle

thousands of people’s personal and financial information from none

other than ChoicePoint.

So not only do ChoicePoint executives make up words, they make up

facts too. That means you and I are free to call the company a group

of liesters, fibsters, scamsters and scumsters.

Moving on to Question 2 on our quiz: Last week’s column on the

subjunctive mood was based in part on a large stack of grammar and

style reference books I own, most of which seem to think that the

subjunctive is barely breathing, obsolete and ignored. So imagine my

surprise when this column elicited more e-mails than any other column

in my recent memory. People care about the subjunctive. And a lot of

them know more about the subject than I or perhaps even my books do.

I’m still researching some of the new information I received. If I

come up with any new insights I’ll pass them along. In the meantime,

just know that if you were to accidentally say, “I wish the president

of ChoicePoint was going to prison,” a lot of people out there would

notice that you should have said, “I wish the president of Choice-

Point were going to prison.”

* JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer. She can be reached at

[email protected].