I’m a grown adult and know how to button my shirt and hold two different and legitimate meanings for the same word in my head at the same time. Sometimes it’s productive for words to have different meanings (“progress” comes to mind, in my peer group), sometimes it doesn’t hurt. Sometimes it’s just dumb. For instance, Boston seems to be determined to redefine the word “hoax”.

My understanding of hoax: somebody tries to convince others that a thing is happening that isn’t really happening.

In Boston however, official reality has it that a “hoax” is when authority thinks a thing is happening when it isn’t really happening. Doesn’t matter whether anyone was trying to make them think that it is happening, it just matters that they think it is. Thus if something you do is misinterpreted by them, you are responsible for perpetrating a hoax. Perhaps criminally responsible. More specifically (if this is Boston) you are responsible for a bomb hoax.

Exhibit A: The aqua teen hunger force “bomb hoax”. In which people put up LED-glowy signs which looked nothing like bombs, but were interpreted as bombs by the apparently un-bomb-savvy people in charge of dealing with bombs, and blown up. After they realized they weren’t bombs, and one hopes had the mental flexibility to realize they were never remotely meant to look like bombs, the authorities continued to mouth the words “bomb hoax” for weeks on end, and the term was carried in headlines from most of the major media sources. The “perpetrators” of the “hoax” were treated as actual bomb hoax perpetrators and criminally charged. Luckily for our collective sanity, said perps had the un-Bostonian mental flexibility to be resistant to the insidious pull of official-reality broadcasting, and took the charges with exactly the seriousness they deserved. I loved those guys, I still do.

Exhibit B: some comp-art dork shows up for her flight at the Boston Logan airport with an art-installation stylized electronic device harnessed to her chest. The authorities respond swiftly and with prejudice and for once I think they were in the right to do so. I haven’t seen the device, but if it looked even kinda like a bomb then they really should have worried about it being strapped to somebody in an airport. So they got out the guns and took her into custody and hopefully she retroactively realized that there are some reasonable limits to personal expression and they tousled her hair and told her “get out of here kid and don’t come back with fake bombs” and she said “gee officer, and I hope my friends learned a lesson too!” and we can all expect there to be fewer impromptu bomb-art-installations in airports from here on out.

Except, guess what! The authorities decided she meant to make people think it was a bomb, and what the authorities decide is what’s real even if it isn’t, so they retroactively inserted the intent in her mind of making a “hoax” and told everybody and now that is what the media are calling it. Too bad english language, it’s more important that our homeland security heroes feel self-important and justified in over-responding to future incidents, so you’re just going to have to take the hit, again, in Boston. Better stay out of Boston next time english language. It isn’t safe for you in there.