"Truthiness" is a word familiar to most fans of the sometimesbrilliant Stephen Colbert Report.

For those readers who are not Colbert junkies, here's a definition from Merriam-Webster Online: ("Truthiness" was chosen as) the 2006 annual Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society, and defined by them as "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true (over) concepts or facts known to be true." Colbert himself defined it as "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005). Many well-deserved accolades have been given to Colbert and his show for creating transparency in the wardrobes of emperors; sometimes the only proper response to a bald-faced lie is to draw a Snidely-Whiplash mustache on it, so that the less-assertive among us will feel free to give it the belly-laugh it deserves. Coining a word like Truthiness is a fine public service, providing a label for a concept that's not immediately obvious, and thus helping to expose a weapon of mass deception. Speaking of such deceptions, there's one which Pete Hendrickson labored mightily to reveal in his book Cracking the Code. (The deceivers in question are those lackeys of the emperor known as "legislative draftsmen" who crafted the language of our laws, to enable deceptions of which most of us continue to be the unaware victims, especially in the case of the income tax laws.) Pete's books are not easy reading; they require that the reader try to follow the convoluted obfuscations built into the law and see through them to the truth. Unfortunately, this task is akin to visualizing the big picture while looking through a glass onion. Just before the Foreword in his book, Cracking the Code, Pete provides a quote from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which he hopes will speak for itself:

I dont know what you mean by "glory, Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. Of course you dont'till I tell you. I meant, "Theres a nice knock-down argument for you!

But "glory" doesnt mean "a nice knock-down argument, Alice objected. When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to meanneither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be masterthats all. In the context of the book, the relevance of that quote becomes clear. The income tax law was written by legislative draftsmen in the employ of the Humpty Dumpty lawyers in Congress, with the intent to create tax laws which appear to mean one thing, but actually mean something else entirely. Pete never makes this case directly, but provides ample evidence for the careful reader to draw this conclusion using their own common sense. The premise which Pete tries to guide the reader towards understanding is this: the holy grail of politicians has long been a method to provide an automatic, steady stream of funds which they could use to manipulate, for their own benefit, the electorate which they ostensibly served, without having to constantly make their case that money was required for this or that purpose before collecting it. Our nation's founders took pains to make such collection difficult and cumbersome, so as to deliberately maintain this burden on a central government whose power they feared sufficiently (and with ample historical justification) to "bind it down with the chains of the Constitution" to restrict its power. One of those chains was a requirement that the central government could levy no direct tax on income that was not apportioned equally among the citizens of the states. In practice, this meant that the federal government was forced, on an annual basis, to request funding

from the states, who would collect the tax (as they saw fit); each state would be assessed based on their population. The federal government chafed under this requirement; the founders had made amending the constitution, the most direct approach to solving the "problem," far too difficult. Eventually, a goal was formulated: find ways to write tax laws that could not be challenged on a constitutional basis, yet achieved the desired results. This goal was met with the technique of changing the meaning of words used the laws, by means of creating custom legal terms. Here's the diabolically clever part: create these terms using ordinary words, or combinations of ordinary words, and give to them definitions which were entirely different from the meanings of the words as commonly understood. The spellings and pronunciations of these words would not change, just the meaning of the phrases they formed, as these custom legal terms were created. The very existence of these terms would remain a secret to anyone who was unaware of how they were hidden in plain sight: in the "definitions" sections of the laws. There you have it: the secret of controlling an entire legal system, and its tax structure: control the meaning of words within the tax laws, and conceal this control by hiding the technique in plain sight, for the ultimate in plausible deniability. It's hard to conceive of a sweeter scam. Even though the secret has been thus revealed, a huge problem remains: demonstrating the workings of this scam to the average person (hell, even to most contemporary lawyers and legislators) is a daunting task. Although the true meanings of laws thus obfuscated can be demonstrated, to do so requires that the readers of the laws be fully aware of the existence of these custom-defined legal terms, as they read the laws, and translate the law back into plain English, whento all appearancesplain English is exactly what they're reading!

To quote from the beginning of this article: "Coining a word like Truthiness is a fine public service, providing a label for a concept that's not immediately obvious, and thus helping to expose a weapon of mass deception." A catchy new word that encapsulates a useful truth-revealing concept is, indeed, a fine public service, provided that its meaning catches on and spreads until another glass onion is smashed, defeating those who benefit mightily from the mass deception. As my own public service, I offer this new word: "Legalish." I offer my working definition below, and welcome any refinements which will increase its precision and clarity. Legalish: 1) Noun: a pseudo-language found only within legal statutes, consisting of a colloidal* mixture of plain English and specialized legal terms masquerading as english. 2) Adjective: a Legalish term is a common word or phrase which has been custom-defined to create a legal term, and has the following four qualities: 1) It has the same spelling, pronunciation and appearance as the ordinary word or phrase it mimics. 2) The meaning of the term must be different from the word or phrase it mimics; otherwise, it would be unnecessary and superfluous. 3) The placement of the term within a law must serve a purpose which the ordinary word or phrase it mimics cannot serve. 4) The presence of one or more of these terms in a statute (or section) of law always changes the legal meaning and/or function of the statute within which it is specified to apply, into a meaning and/or function different from that which it would have without the term(s). Nested Legalish: Legalish which has embedded within its text other Legalish terms. Nesting the terms within each other, like Russian dolls, exponentially compounds the obfuscation produced by a single term. The definitions of the Legalish terms are not nested, however, but scattered in different sections of the law to make their detection more difficult. *Like a colloid, Legalish is a mixture so thorough that its components can't be separated by ordinary means, or even

distinguished from each other, so that the authors of a law can plausibly deny the intent to deceive. The fraud will remain invisible until its victims become aware of its existence, and know where to look for it: in the "definitions" sections of statutes. Unlike a spontaneous dialect of two languages blended together, such as "Spanglish," a strong case can be made that Legalish was created by the legislative draftsmen hired by our "representatives" for one diabolical purpose: to hide the essence of a law's meaning, so as to create a law which meets the legal requirement of meaning what it says and saying what it means, while simultaneously appearing to mean something it does not. Of course, it is possible for attorneys and legislators unfamiliar with the concept of Legalish to be fooled along with the rest of us. Hiding this weapon in plain sight is an aid to providing plausible deniability for those who know how it's used, as in "Oh, didn't you know that? It's right there in the law." The primary practical use of Legalish is as a weapon of mass deception. It is not used to cloak an unconstitutional statute with a robe of apparent legality, but rather to cloak the true meaning of a law in order to comply with the constitution while appearing to flout or ignore the constitution, leading those who oppose the law (on whatever grounds) to imagine it unconstitutional, leading these opponents to a dead-end argument. The fog thus created by Legalish will mislead even legal scholars to imagine that they are not smart enough to parse the actual meaning of a law. By creating specialized legal terms, applicable only within the context of a specified body of law, and concealing their very existence by wrapping them in the clothing of ordinary, commonly-understood words, the creators of Legalish have used it as a weapon against those whom they allegedly represent, to facilitate an end-run around the barriers to unlimited power wisely erected by our nation's founders when they formulated our Constitution. Further, by nesting Legalish words like Russian dolls within the definitions of other Legalish words, the masters of Legalish have hidden their deceptions in plain sight. They have distorted the apparent meaning of laws; just as the layers of a

glass onion distort an otherwise-clear image, Legalish hides the actual meanings of Legalish-corrupted laws from everyone, including most government officials and attorneys. Another way to describe"Legalish" is as a stealth weapon used by legislators, disguised as English. Its only use is to construct a law that does not mean what it appears to say, by changing the meanings of words without changing their spelling or pronunciation, disguising the true nature of laws which have been corrupted by the use of Legalish. Legalish is deceptive, but nested Legalish is exponentially worse. Used to deadly effect in our tax laws, it compounds the obfuscation produced by each Legalish term alone. Pete Hendrickson provides the following example in his book, Cracking the Code" (note that legal terms are in italic): "(Section 1607,) like section 1401 (by which a tax appears to be laid on the self-employed), relies on the definition of 'net earnings from self-employment' found in section 1402, despite being (about 1 million) words away from it . . . Remember (as detailed earlier) that the tax is imposed on 'self-employment income,' which term is later (in a different section of law) defined as the 'net earnings from self-employment' (a term defined earlier as) the 'gross income derived by an individual from any trade or business,' a term custom-defined a few hundred thousand words later in the code . . . Are we having fun yet?" In the example above, there are at least four co-dependent, custom-defined legal terms used in the section of law which appears to lay a tax on the "self-employed" (as those words are commonly understood). Three things are necessary to understand the true meaning of this section of law: first, that the italicized phrases are legal terms, and do not carry the same meanings as do the common words with which they are built; second, to know the definitions of these terms; third, to be able to parse the

meaning of the law by emptying out the Russian doll so that all the dolls inside are visiblemuch like diagramming a sentence, constructing an algebraic formula and solving it to derive the law's meaning. Are law students taught how to do this before they can pass the Bar exam, or are they as clueless as the rest of us about the obfuscating, menacing magic of Legalish? Here's a project for an interested reader, a programmer who has worked with artificial intelligence projects, perhaps: develop a program which could perform the necessary steps to remove Legalish from laws in a systematic way. First, extract the text of all the definitions in a legal title (say, #26, the Income Tax Code). Second, search the code and flag all instances of the definitions which create custom-defined legal terms. Third, replace the (Legalish) terms embedded in a section of law with the definitions of these terms. Finally, normalize the syntax and grammar of the resulting text for readability and comprehension. Voila! Legalish decoded! The first step in pulling the fangs from this viper is for a careful reader to detect the presence of Legalish in a title; it can be argued that Pete Hendrickson has already performed this task for Title 26. A second step could be simply modifying an electronic edition of the law by highlighting the Legalish words and terms everywhere they appear in the text, with hyperlinks back to their definitions. I suggest highlighting with a different color, now that our technology supports it, for visibility and to distinguish Legalish from other commonly-used modes such as quotes, italics, boldface, all-caps, or different fonts which may already be present in the text. It will be essential to so highlight Legalish terms where they occur within the definitions of other terms, to reveal instances of nested Legalish. With that task accomplished, the parsing could be done manually without further computer assistance.

Reading a law corrupted by Legalish is like trying to get a clear view through a glass onion. Let's smash that onion by spreading a careful definition of this new word Legalish, far and wide. Awareness by ordinary people that Legalish is being used as a weapon against them, and awareness of the presence of Legalish in a particular law, should be enough to put defenders of that law on the defensiveeven if the obscured, true meaning of that law is beyond the ability of that ordinary person to clearly see. If this spiffy new word goes viral, facilitating the "decoding" of Legalishcorrupted laws, one of the most difficult-to-grasp concepts in Pete Hendrickson's book Cracking the Code could become so clear to everyone that the continuing fraud and disinformation campaigns by the IRS and its beneficiaries against the simple truths embedded in our tax laws will become unsustainable. Why, it could even fit on a bumper sticker: "Ban Legalish!"