Freivalds: You'll need to know 'whereas-speak' at The Club

Published September 14^th, 2018

By John Freivalds

Lakeshore Weekly News- Savage, MN

Buy low, sell high. The best sale is a good purchase. High prices cure high prices; low prices cure low prices. If you watch the pennies, the dollars will take care of themselves.

Dem's da words of wisdom I learned from my super-wealthy boss at The Grain Exchange, where I worked when I came to Minneapolis many moons ago. The language I learned was short, sweet and precise. I even learned the sign language of trading grain on the floor of the exchange which was even more precise — you know all that hand waving with outstretched fingers and closed fists.

The Grain Exchange is long gone and now I live by Lake Minnetonka totally surrounded by lawyers, politically correct politicians, professorial pontificators and high-powered PowerPoint business executives. Their sentence construction is often unintelligible to me, but the price of entry into these groups is to learn their convoluted lingo. To help me adapt to this world, my grain-trading boss sent me to law school so I wouldn't embarrass myself (and him) at meetings, giving depositions and speeches, writing contracts or chatting at dinner parties at The Club.

Just remember to use herein, hereto, hereby, herewith, whereby and wherefore — lots!

To give you an idea, I put my boss' words of wisdom in a "whereas-speak" format. To learn to use "whereas-speak," you have to pay big bucks to go to law school or get your MBA from Harvard or go to school in Washington, D.C., which I did. But all you learn in the end is whereas means nothing more than "given the fact." Herein, therefore, are some examples.

Buy low, sell high. Whereas price disparities are a recurring feature of the econometric marketplace, let it hereby be known to all men and ships at sea that the discovery of these disparities can have positive ramifications if they can be accessed in a propitious manner whereby the disposal feature exceeds that of the acquisition feature.

The best sale is a good purchase. Whereby disposal of the heretofore acquired commodity has the characteristic of higher value than its acquisition, let it hereby be known that the aforementioned transaction may be considered fortuitous to the disposer.

High prices cure high prices; low prices cure low prices. Whereas any government intervention in the econometric marketplace will have deleterious short-term effects to the nongovernmental sector. Prices which are elevated in the short term will cause buyers to hold off on purchases, thereby causing prices to fall. Conversely when prices are low and inhibit the holder to profitably sell, the hold-back of commodities will create a shortage, leading prices to once again rise.

If you watch the pennies, the dollars will take care of themselves. Whereas the scrupulous attention to the expenditure of the least expensive item will provide a precedent to further scrutinize more expensive items.

So has language gotten simpler, somewhat? I mark the change in Bill Clinton's (my classmate at Georgetown) first presidential campaign slogan: "It's the economy, stupid." Today, however, the slogans are short but they are less civil, if not mean, in a conscious attempt to get away from political correctness and "whereas-speak." They have little to do with economic matters but a person's appearance and ancestry.

In sum, my beloved mother, who we lovingly called Mimi, always said, "If you can't say something nice about a person, don't say anything at all."

John Freivalds is an author, commodities broker and opinion columnist. He lives on Old Beach Road in the Navarre neighborhood of Orono along with Linda his wife, a flock of turkeys, a herd of deer, a family of foxes, many raccoons, two mallards, two pheasants and innumerable songbirds.