[conspire] Numbers racket

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> You can make fun of them.  That is more than OK.  I am sorry I am not
> clearer.  
> 
> Fungable?  Data that can be massaged for your own purposes?

I appreciate hearing a description of what you meant, since that 
truly does clarify.

Deirdre gets the prize on this one, because she correctly guessed that
you meant 'fungible'.  And, hey, you're in good company in getting these 
vowels wrong, since fanously the English language has ridiculously
inconsistent spelling patterns.

For the record, 'fungible' means (in essence) interchangeable.  Like,
for example, farmers who are members of agricultural cooperatives bring
their harvested wheat to silos owned by the cooperative.  Later, each
farmer is entitled to extract the, so to speak, banked quantity of wheat
from one of the silos, but it's understood that the farmer will almost
certainly not be getting back the same wheat he/she checked in -- but
that this is OK because wheat is deemed (within limits) fungible.

To use a less rural metaphor, if I have a dime, and I then trade my dime
with your dime, I'm not bothered by the substitution, because even
though one of our pockets might be grungier than the other, at the end
of the day dimes are fungible.

Deirdre would have won the bet, but my objection was that the meaning of
'fungible' doesn't work in your sentence.  You probably meant something
like 'debatable'.