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At each head-shaking headline, I wonder where these people came from.

The verb ‘graft’ is a word that means ‘corruption,’ and comes from an earlier English word for a ditch, a moat or ‘a digging.’ By 1906, in American English, it was used in the noun form and by 1915, the verb, adding weight to the already extant phrase “confidence trickster.” A grifter was a chiefly a liar, a conniver, a person involved in the graft and corruption of another, which was a low activity for lowlifes, as low as a ditch, or a moat, or a digging. We’re watching, and history is recording, how such low lives are lived, low and digging lower, together in their muck…

nota bene

Grifter,
Like calls to like:
As magnets call iron
Like waste attracts flies, fools gather
To you.


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