I notice that there are many ways of expressing the term "money". And there are many career specialists, each with his or her own title, that work with making money flow. Stagnant money is apparently no good. The creation of special money words and money people keeps most of us from gaining a reasonable understanding of the subject, which, I believe, is what the specialists want. I spent a day or two this past week studying online sources so that I might become more knowledgeable about this country's difficulties over money. I was reasonably sure that I was embarking on an impossible task. I have to pay an agency to take care of my own retirement money, for fear that I will somehow mistakenly fumble it all away in a day. If I cannot understand the management of my own money, how might I expect to understand the money situation of the richest country on earth?

Just take a look at this list of words, in no particular order: liquidity, equity, quantitative easing, reserves, fractional reserves, prosperity, International Monetary Fund, rehypothecation, default, debit, debt, balance, trade imbalance, bonds, bubbles, allocations, central banking units, stocks, crashes, booms, upticks, hockey sticks, economics, finance, ceilings, dividends, growth, compounding, interest, taxes, savings, budgets, pay, payments, purchases, dollars, Euros, bail-outs, inflation, deflation, assets, assessments, borrowing, lending, currencies, bitcoins, cash, transactions, charges, refunds, indexed funds, trading, laundering, stashing, mortgage, underwater, coins, wealth, poverty, exchanges, paper, bucks, futures, gold, fiat, deferment, bank notes, promissory notes, accounts, deposits, and expenses.

Each of these words describes money in some form or other. Give me a couple of hours of research and I could make the list ten times as long and a hundred times more obscure. Hundreds of books and websites describe the words in more detail, while a swarm of advisors and counselors take advantage of the public with their special knowledge, because we don't know what the terms mean, nor how to deal with them in our daily lives. We are all forced to live with this worldwide complexity called money, whether we are buying a loaf bread for dinner or a fleet of nuclear submarines for our naval armada.

I would prefer to know just enough to get my daily bread, and not much more than that. Even during the years I was working, I didn't particularly relish having to manage my own money--a bank account and a paycheck stub. Whether buying bread or nuclear submarines, all the money in this country comes from one central pot where it is magically brought into existence. Pensioners and military planners all must have some common understanding of the dollar, and the system in place that produces and distributes the dollars.

If I could take a walk through the forest while holding a money-identification guide to help me locate and identify all the lovely forms of money lying on the floor of the forest, I might not feel so muddled and frustrated by my ignorance. When I tune into the media, I don't get an easy understanding of the landscape of money. I get a description of forces at work on these many different forms of money, such as "the uptick in deflationary bond assessments indicates that the International Monetary Fund will be fractionally rehypothecating in foreign currencies".

The way this highly specialized vernacular rolls off the tongues of the specialists reminds me of a game my daughter used to like to play called Mad Libs. In Mad Libs you make up a story, and ask another person for a list of words that you then insert back into the story as replacements for the original words, so that you get silly sentences like "I went to the sunflower" instead of "I went to the store"; or "I am an aardvark" instead of "I am a human being".

I wonder if many money experts are only playing a game of Mad Libs. "The recent trade imbalance is a hockey stick assessment of our currency lending", or "The bond bubble accounts for the liquidity of gold futures in financially-stressed foreign markets". When I explore the media for information about money, it does sound a lot like people playing an extended game of Mad Libs. The online format for talking about money is usually two or more people in dialog that are swapping ideas or information. These dialogs would be much more sensible if the speakers would simply use the term money when they mean money, rather than one of money's many synonyms.

It's rather like the biblical dictate to let your "yes" mean "yes" and let your "no" mean "no". But isn't it interesting that the great code book of morality for western civilization, the Bible, should equate word clarity with Godly conduct? The variety of specialized terms that have been concocted and have confused us about money seem to also alienate us from each other--the "haves" and the "have-yachts". Society as a whole does not understand money very well, which has caused us to become more polarized, but that was the original intent of specialization.

If I had influence I would split up society more like this: Those who think money is the most important thing in life and want more of it, including those who must purchase nuclear submarines, must go to one central location to obtain it. There they will be given an examination, in which they are required to list out a thousand different synonyms for money. If they complete the exam on time, they are allowed entrance, through the eye of a needle, into that club. Everybody else belongs to the other club.