How to Learn Your Credit Score, by Andrea Coobes, WSJ
"The world of credit ratings is getting more transparent, thanks in part to a number of Web sites offering free credit scores and credit-management tools. But that doesn't mean understanding your credit ranking is any easier. It may be more complicated than ever. Those Web sites, while useful, often provide different answers to the same seemingly simple question: What's my score?"

rhopalic (ro-PAL-ik) adjective
having each successive word longer by a letter or syllable
from Latin rhopalicus, from Greek rhopalos (club, tapered cudgel)
A rhopalic verse or sentence is one that balloons--where each word is a letter or a syllable longer. The word is also used as a noun. Here's a terrific example of a rhopalic by Dmitri Borgmann:
"I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalises intercommunications' incomprehensibleness." A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Some search-and-seizure cases taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court concern sets of facts so specific and arcane that it's hard to know what to make of them. (For instance, in Arizona v. Gant the court last term ruled that a police officer r needs a warrant before searching a car after an arrest of the car's occupant, unless at the time of the search the person is unsecured and within reaching distance of the passenger compartment of the vehicle or police officers have reason to believe that the evidence for the crime the person is being arrested will be found in the vehicle. But on Monday, the court granted cert on a fact-pattern that any government employee with a BlackBerry can likely appreciate. The court agreed Monday to consider whether government employers can read text messages that their workers send and receive on workplace devices. Click here for the WSJ story. The case centers on this simple and rather compelling question: whether a police officer in Ontario, Calif., had a right to privacy for the text messages he sent and received on a pager provided by the police department. The city said Sgt. Jeff Quon used his pager to send hundreds of personal messages to his wife, his girlfriend and another officer.
WSJ Law Blog December 14, 2009

Caregiving in the U.S. 2009
National Alliance for Caregiving in Collaboration with AARP: "Caregiving is still mostly a woman's job and many women are putting their career and financial futures on hold as they juggle part-time caregiving and full-time job requirements. This is the reality reported in Caregiving in the U.S. 2009, the most comprehensive examination to date of caregiving in America. The first national profile of caregivers, Family Caregiving in the U.S. was published in 1997, and an updated version of the study, Caregiving in the U.S., was reported in 2004. The sweeping 2009 study of the legions of people caring for younger adults, older adults, and children with special needs reveals that 29 percent of the U.S. adult population, or 65.7 million people, are caregivers, including 31 percent of all households. These caregivers provide an average of 20 hours of care per week. The 2009 reports also begin to trend the findings from all three waves of the study."

A purist is what you call someone you disagree with.
A negative person is what you call someone you disagree with.
Irresponsible debate is language you disagree with.
Debate is language you agree with.
A gadfly is what you call someone you disagree with.
A whiner is what you call someone you disagree with.