Even the Dictionary Hates Debt Collectors

Patrick Lunsford

Consumers, their advocates and lawyers, the press, and most lawmakers and regulators don’t have much love for debt collectors.  But the dictionary? Yeah, it too.

Last week, we ran a piece on a court decision that took a stab at defining what “harassment” is – or, in actuality, isn’t – under the FDCPA. “Harass” is one of those tricky English words that is hard to define, but everyone kind of knows what it is when they see it, like the popular definition of “pornography.”

It’s also a tricky word to spell, at least for publication. Does it have two R’s? One? Maybe we should look it up, just to be sure.  So I did.

It has one R, for the record.

In reviewing the Dictionary.com entry for “harass,” I learned a lot. First: it’s not that tricky to define. “To disturb persistently; torment.” That’s a pretty pithy definition, and it works well. So let’s scroll down a little and see how Dictionary.com uses this word in a sentence.

Example Sentences, entry #1: “Collection agencies harass workers at their places of employment, threatening their jobs.”

Oh dear. Et tu, dictionary?

It’s hard enough to tell the accurate story of the ARM industry with so much negative information out there in papers, on TV news, and on various Web sites. Now the dictionary has to get in on the act?

This is never going to be an industry that is warmly embraced by the public. Debt collectors do, after all, spend their day asking people for money. But when the narrative of an entire business is so commonly accepted that a sentence like that can show up in a dictionary, I think we should be taking a harder look at how to earnestly change perceptions.