Everyone who’s worked the defense side in a criminal drug case knows that a special agent (it’s always a “special” agent) who gives “expert” testimony about “drug jargon” is subject to about the same semantic constraints as Humpty Dumpty. Basically, take even the most benign, everyday topic of conversation (say, “tickets to the Dodgers game”), and you can cast it as having some drug-related meaning encoded in it, if you try hard enough. And they usually do try hard enough.
All that just to say that Scott Greenfield has what I take to be the classic illustration:
I borrowed a client’s cellphone on the way home from an arraignment to call my mother, as it was her birthday and, well, I forgot to call. Two years later, I’m reading through transcripts of telephone conversations and see my call to my mother, with the notation, “birthday refers to delivery of large quantities of narcotics.” True story.
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