Grift

Grift · A Grifter? Me?

It seems, first of all, it is a US word. Not UK, not Ireland, not Australia, but mainly US.

grift
noun [ U ] mainly US informal
UK /ɡrɪft/ US /ɡrɪft/

ways of getting money dishonestly that involve tricking someone:
The plot of the movie includes grift, betrayal, and daredevil escapes.

Cambridge dictionary : grift
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/fr/dictionnaire/anglais/grift

Next one is from the google search:
Definitions from Oxford Languages · Read more

grift
/ɡrɪft/
INFORMAL•NORTH AMERICAN

verb
engage in petty or small-scale swindling.
"how long have you been grifting?"

noun
a petty or small-scale swindle.
"a Sixth Avenue palmistry grift"

So, grift is to swindle what larceny* is to stealing?

There is a problem here. Whether a certain merchandise was in the shop, whether it was paid for, whether it was taken out of the shop, whether the shopowner agreed to get it out of the shop without paying** or not, all of this is fairly straightforward. But whether a certain practise is dishonest, whether it involves tricking someone, is more debatable. Lying is lying, but when the lie is not about the actual value, but about a thing indirectly tied to it - is it still a swindle?*** If you say a horse has good teeth and it has bad teeth, that is a swindle. If you say a horse has been ridden by a duke, that actually says nothing of its value, so pretending it has is not a swindle. Unless of course there is a known interest in collecting objects tied to a particular duke. Or King or Rock and Roll, to take a more realistic example. Sell a Royce as one Elvis owned, and he didn't, that's swindle. You are swindling someone trying to collect Elvis items, and failing to get a real one. I am obviously speaking of sums that are totally out of proportion to the thing presumed to have been owned as simply useful objects. Sums one can only dream of by speaking up it is from Elvis.

It's ironic that an English civilisation which between 1500 and 1600 underwent major upheavals and bloodbaths over pretending, among other things, relics were a kind of grift, when in fact relics are often enough given as gifts or exchanged for other objects of the Catholic cult, should end up chasing after relics of another type, where the pricing is such that major swindles, far beyond grifts, are in fact possible. But anyway, the Catholic will not concede that the relics are a grift, and the Elvis swindles are way beyond grift, just as fake Rembrandt paintings are. So, it is kind of outside the subject.

Many views not only does not mean the page is good (pornography can get many views), but is not even tying the page to a specific name, either of a rock star or of a saint. So, is it worth bothering about?

If it isn't, US Americans bickering over this type of possible grift says something about the culture of those so bickering. Click fraud, when I look it up, can land no one in prison, it just serves as an excuse for platforms to cull away views on the suspicion that they are click farm generated. And the more the US culture bickers over grift, the more such content platforms cull away, including real views.

Now, I am not paid per view, but the more views I have, supposing them legitimate (which they seem to be), the more interest I could be to a book publisher. And, unlike page views, sold copies are not so easy to fake and also not so interesting to fake.

I wonder if any grift recognised as such is mortally sinful - but this is because I am very sure that taking interest on money loans is not usually recognised as a grift. Palm reading is actually worse if in a case it is not a grift, since it would take demons for it to work.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Trinity Sunday
4.VI.2023

* Shoplifting is referred to as petty larceny. Seems on verification that bigger things, like burglary are also "larceny" but not "petty" ...
** Like it has happened when I had no money I asked a shopowner for alms in natura, and it has happened he gave such, a few apples or bananas.
*** Page views are indirectly tied to the value of the page that is viewed, in so far as better pages tend to get more viewers, but as this is not always so, the page views in and of themselves are not indicative of value. However, pages more viewed and known to be that tend to get more views for being known to get that. In some contexts, like monetizing videos, the views are very directly tied to the monetizing, but in ways that cannot be manipulated directly by a lie about previous views. Google analytics is not getting the information from your statements.

Click farms are usually located in developing countries, such as China, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Bangladesh.

Can state with confidence, that's not where I get much of my traffic from.