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For a chunk of my early 20s, I was a friendly face in my hometown’s gray-market gambling scene.

I worked the cash register at a video poker room, handing out cookies and crockpot hot dogs to a regular crowd of seniors playing away their Social Security payments. My particular post was named after a bogus veterans charity, but the clientele almost exclusively called it “the hot spot.”

The activity we appeared to be engaged in wasn’t legal in Florida, outside of Native reservations. But this hot spot and others across the Sunshine State took advantage of a legal loophole allowing businesses to offer promotional giveaways. Though many of our customers didn’t know this, we were technically an internet cafe. The room was stuffed to bursting with cheap PCs running sweepstakes software skinned to look like slot machines. Our customers purchased time to get online and were offered one sweepstakes entry per one-cent spent. Those entries then played out in software on the computers: the flashing lights and spinning reels serving as literal bells and whistles.

About a third of my job description was about preventing the gambling adults in our gambling establishment from giving the game away by using gambling terms. Phrases like “cash out,” “stake” and “bet” were forbidden. These admonitions were delivered with a wink as I handed over their “redeemed sweepstakes winnings.”

Nearly 15 years later, it seems like that wink-wink, nudge-nudge is everywhere in the United States. Powerful people, corporations and politicians act as if criminality operates on the same principle as “The Secret.” The ill effects will only manifest if you say the magic words.

This is most obvious in the gambling sphere. Major sports leagues, partnered with bookmakers, handle points-shaving investigations like a dog trying not to stare directly at food on the kitchen table. Polymarket and Kalshi try to make a “sportsbook of things,” using the language of the stock market to run cover for easily-gamed prop bets.

The magical thinking that leads us to believe we can ward off unhappy consequences as long as we use the right words has spread into politics. Trump administration insiders are seemingly using their advance knowledge to make bank on platforms like Polymarket. But beyond that, the ruling party continues to sidestep limits on executive power through the strategic use of circumspect language.

Any policy can only be racist if the agency that outlined it also wrote racial slurs in triplicate. You can’t call the operation in Iran a “war” because wars require congressional approval. A bribe only occurs when someone hands a politician a cartoonishly large bag of money with dollar signs on the side and explicitly asks for something in return. (And sometimes not even then!)

This has led to an administration that acts as if laws don’t apply to it, but superstitions do. They’re more than willing to keep carrying out orders from hell, so long as no one speaks of the devil.

What do you think? Will these word games hold up forever? Sound off in the comments.

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