bill collectors have reached a new low, it seems. i got home today to a message on my machine that went, “hello my full name. this is generic woman’s name from generic corporate-sounding firm. could you please pass a message to your neighbor, first and last name. tell him to please call me back at 877-555-5555 about an important matter…”

jeez. can they do that? can they actually harass someone’s neighbor to try and shame them into paying their bills? now, i’m all for paying one’s bills and not spending more than one earns and good fiscal responsibility like that, but i also know first hand that one can get screwed through no fault of one’s own (poorly-managed health insurance plans, for example, cough cough) and have bill collectors calling at all hours while you’re waiting for some pea-brained administrator to straighten out their mistake. so i’m not passing judgement on my neighbor (and besides, i have no idea who this person is anyway). and yeah, technically the message said nothing about it being a bill collector, but really, there’s only one reason why pleasant-sounding women call from anonymous-sounded firms and leave 877 callback numbers. talk about invasion of privacy. if she calls again i might take up this fight just out of spite.

q. so what’s really bugging you today?

a. oh, so glad you asked. at the moment, it’s that dunkin’ dougnuts commercial* where all the zombie-looking people sing about how confusing it is to order espresso (digging, in particular, at starbuck’s admittedly inconsistent tall-grande-venti sizing system). the chorus goes, “is it french or is it italian? perhaps fratalian.” followed by a voiceover: “lattes from dunkin doughnuts. you order them in english, not fratalian.” is it possible that they actually missed the irony in that latte is not, in fact, an english word? i hate this kind of rah-rah-average-joe-ness that smacks of cultural xenophobia. we appropriate yummy foreign foods, but god forbid that we have to wrap our mouths around a unfamiliar word in order to do it. everywhere else in the world, educated people learn to speak two, three or more languages. what gives americans the perogative to bask in our own cultural ignorance? it’d be one thing if we were some little isolationist nation. but the US goes lumbering around the world imposing our own notions of right and wrong on other cultures right and left.

you know who else has been up to this same sort of cultural newspeak? Iran. we snickered last summer at the news blurb that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had required that more than 2000 foreign-appropriation words be replaced with modified farsi words. pizzas, for example, are now known as “elastic loaves” (washington post article