Welcome to the first installment of Spin Cycle, where we shake our collective fist at people who are bullshitting us in the news.

Today we are going to talk about sound cannons.

First of all: Yes! There is such a thing as a SOUND CANNON. The science of how it works is pretty cool, but the name tells you everything you need to know. It’s like a regular cannon, except it shoots sound instead of cannonballs.

The Chicago Police have apparently gotten their hands on one of these things in preparation for some large protests that are about to happen.

So, to recap: We have a large, tense political protest and a military-grade weapon. If this combination of things sounds dangerous to you, the spokesperson for the Chicago Police would like you to forget about the sound cannon. It is, she says, “simply a risk management tool.”

Ooooh, risk management. Right. Very boring. When you put it that way, a sound cannon is essentially the same thing as health insurance.

I don’t mean to pick on this lady. We all say dumb things at work sometimes. It’s just that I live in Chicago, which means that the Chicago police may — at any time, really — decide to blast me or someone I know with a goddamn sound cannon, and she’s trying to convince us it’s some kind of dull bureaucratic necessity. Okay? It’s a military-grade weapon, not a fucking seatbelt.

Look, I’m glad it’s not my job to make sure no one burns the city down this weekend. But it’s important for everyone — especially the people wielding the giant weapons — to be honest about what they’re doing.

Consider the difference between these two questions: Is it okay to manage risks? Is it okay to assault thousands of people at a time in the name of public safety?

You might think analogies are boring, stupid word games The Man makes you play on standardized tests like the SAT to prove how much you want to go to college.

Your heart is in the right place. We hate standardized tests, too. But unlike the SAT, analogies are really interesting and important, so you might as well stick around for this one.

An analogy is like a metaphor on steroids. The point of an analogy is to make you think about the relationships between things.

Imagine you’re standing straight up with your arms raised toward the sky. You might say you’re standing like a tree. That’s a metaphor.* An analogy is a little more specific. If you want to draw an analogy between yourself and the tree, you’ll have to explain why “tree” is a good metaphor for how you are standing. For example, your arms are sticking out of your body the way the branches stick out of the tree.

On a standardized test, you’d write it like this — tree:branches::you:arms — but all you’re saying is that a tree’s relationship to its branches is like your relationship to your arms.

When analogies try to compare a lot of different things all at once, they can get pretty confusing, and sometimes they go horribly wrong. We’ll talk about the ways that can happen another day.

*Misguided pedants: We don’t talk about similes here because we like having friends.

The words people invent can tell you a lot about the things that matter to them. Like there is a reason we have a word for the internet but no word for the supremely uncomfortable feeling you get when you understand a joke but still don’t think it’s funny and everyone around you is laughing and you’re just standing there like an asshole:

The internet is way more important to us than that feeling.

But sometimes words hang around long after we stop caring about the things they describe. Take the word “bastard.”

“Bastard” used to refer to a kid whose parents weren’t married. For a long time, when you called someone a bastard, you were basically saying, “Your parents were not married when you were born! This accusation should make you feel ashamed if it is true and insulted if it is not true!”

No one thinks about that anymore, of course — it’s just a generic insult — but it shows how deeply people once cared about stupid bullshit like whether your parents were willing to get and stay married even if they didn’t particularly like each other.

Of course, people still care about all kinds of stupid bullshit, and we have the words to prove it. We’ll talk more about those things later.

Have you ever gotten roped into talking to someone who was collecting donations for a nonprofit organization?

Sure you have. You were walking and he was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, grinning and holding a clipboard.

These people with the clipboards don’t come right out and ask you for money. Not at first, anyway. They always open with something like “Do you have a moment for the environment?” or “Do you have a moment to rescue a blind orphaned puppy from a burning building?”

It’s hard to say no, isn’t it? Hard enough that you sometimes cross the street to avoid the clipboard people altogether? Even though you know what they’re really asking is “Hey, will you give me some money?” and you don’t want to give them any, it’s still not easy to look an aggressively well-groomed stranger in the eye and say you do not have a moment to help remove landmines from central-African playgrounds.

Ten seconds ago, this guy was the jerk who interrupted your lunch break to ask you for your credit card number. Now you’re the jerk who hates children. See how quickly he turned it around? All he had to do was ask you the right question.

Q: Hey! What’s racism?

A: It’s when you think one race (your own, usually) is superior to another one.

Q: Okay, so what’s reverse racism?

A: Oh, that’s something some white people say when they think non-white people are being racist against them.

Q: So, when the non-white people think they’re better than white people because of their race.

A: Yeah.

Q: That sounds exactly like regular racism.

A: It is!

Q: Then why don’t they just say “racism?”

A: How should I know? Probably it’s because they don’t pay attention to what they’re saying. But maybe it also has something to do with history. White people have been real dicks to people of basically every other race at some point in history (sometimes very recent history), and whether they want to admit it or not, as a group they still benefit from the racist systems their ancestors set up. And of course some white people are themselves racists. So in the United States (where there are tons of white people around), when racism is in the news, the people doing the racist shit are usually white. That doesn’t mean no one else is a racist, but it does make it easy for people who don’t think very hard to confuse “racism” with “white people acting racist.”

Q: But then why is it pretty much only white people who say “reverse racism?”

A: Weird, huh? It makes it sound like only white people can be real racists, which is both condescending and somehow also offensive to members of all races.

Q: It’s racist, in a way.

A: In two ways.

Q: Oh, boy.

Okay, look, we’re not going to fight about politics today. That’s not what we do here. I’ll let you decide how you think “compassionate conservatives” are different from regular ones.*

But in general, be wary of people who can’t wait to tell you how compassionate they are. In fact, watch out for any person too eager to share any of his or her personality traits with you. Next time you hear the term “compassionate conservative,” I hope you’ll imagine a grinning stranger shaking your hand aggressively and saying, “Hi, I’m Honest John, and this is my friend Not-Racist Mike.” John may indeed be honest and Mike might be the least racist person you’ll ever meet in your life, but you’ll be understandably skeptical until you see how each man acts.

Also, if you belong to a group that makes you feel like you have to let other people know you’re compassionate before you even name the group, maybe it’s time to find some new friends.

*As far as I can tell, the difference is that compassionate conservatives care about poor people but don’t think the government should help them, whereas regular conservatives don’t necessarily give a crap about poor people and also don’t think the government should help them.

Have any of you ever actually seen a boot with straps on it? Could you draw me a picture of a bootstrap? If you use the expression “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” when you mean “work hard to get out of a bad situation,” you definitely haven’t and can’t.

How could I possibly know that? I’m so glad you asked.

Study this image carefully. See the little loop on the back? That’s a bootstrap. Now imagine you are wearing those boots and you slip and fall into a steaming pile of bullshit. Now try to extract yourself from the bullshit using only your upper body. Pull on that little loop. See if it helps.

It is physically impossible to pull yourself anywhere — let alone up — by your bootstraps.

You might want to remember this the next time you hear a politician saying that hard-working Americans don’t need health insurance or social programs because they can always just pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they fall on hard times.

Sharpen your bayonets and pack a bunch of rusty nails into your improvised explosive devices, everybody — it’s class warfare time!

No, hey, settle down. I was only kidding about the weapons. Here at Wordmonster, we like violence almost as little as we like histrionic political language designed to make people hate and fear each other. Which is to say almost not at all.

Class warfare is a metaphor, obviously. The idea is that the different social classes (poor, medium, and rich) are at war. The war is about money. Poor and medium people are trying to take money from rich people, who would prefer to keep it. Instead of using bombs or bullets, the two sides fight with tax laws.

So, points for imagination, I guess, but a strange thing happens when you declare yourself at “war” with people who have more or less money than you do. Can you guess what it is? You start to think of those other people as those other people, the bad guys, the enemy. You also make it easy to confuse your opinion about the marginal tax rate with a moral imperative, a noble cause worth dying for.

Points for imagination, indeed.

There’s a lot of power in a name. Maybe you know this already: Your name is Michael Hunt or Richard Hertz or you’re a thirteen-year-old girl and your last name is Spitz.

People learn about the power of names in different ways, but everyone learns it eventually. Even if you didn’t have parents as terrible as Mike’s and Dick’s, you may have learned about the power of names from the other kids at school. Some enterprising bully met you at your desk one morning and said From now on your name is Shitstain or Blimpy or Assmerelda. Or you were that bully. Or maybe your roundly despised boss has cute nicknames for you and all of your coworkers. You can see the pattern here.

Anyway, there’s this thing people do on the internet and I guess TV but who even watches TV. They come up with stupid names for people — celebrities and politicians, usually — and then hold up the stupid names as evidence that the people they’re talking about are stupid. You know, like when they call presidential candidates “Mittens” and presidential presidents “Obama Bin Lyin’” and wait for the rest of us to point and laugh. Don’t fall for it.

Remember, the way you talk about people — or even hear them talked about — can make you act like a giant dick, so keep it classy out there.

Waterboarding sounds like that thing kids do when they’re learning how to swim. You know, when they grab onto the orange floaty boards and kick, which lets them move around the deep end without having to wear those humiliating inflatable water wings.

Actually, waterboarding is suffocating a person over and over again with water and a wet towel, usually because you think they know something you want to know.

Cute name, though, right?