WINNING LOTTERY AWARD!!!
Mar 19th, 2008 by Micah Tillman | 2 Comments |
I just got another one of those scam lottery e-mails. I’m always winning the lottery in Ireland (and various other countries). My Yahoo! spam filter is getting better at weeding them out for me (even though they may not technically be spam. They may be individually targeted).
But this one got through. And the sender’s name was, “WINNING LOTTERY AWARD.”
Which is hilarious because it’s senseless. An “award” is something you’re given because of some accomplishment on your part, or because of some other awesomeness on your part.
But a lottery is random. The winner isn’t any better than anyone else. The winner is just luckier at the moment in time at which the drawing is made.
Oh for the days when scammers actually used proper semantics.
(Or is it logic? I’m getting myself all confused now).
My wife went through an e-bay phase. One of the things that drove me nuts is they declared the person who got the useless piece of junk the “winner”.
I found this quite ridiculous. Winner implies the most skilled person. The person who ended up with Ebay garbage was simply willing to spend the most money.
It was common before Ebay to refer to the highest bidder of an auction as the winner. See the phrase Winner’s Curse, for example.