Casino terminology.

When you go to a casino, you enter a world filled with new terminology which you don't necessarily hear or use in the "real world."

There are casino terms like comps and free-play, hand-pay, shoe, carnival games, RFB, floorman, pit boss and such.

Well, I just found out about a new casino term in a letter I got from Caesars about the upcoming Great Gift Wrap Up. The term used in the letter was: decrement.

When was the last time you used the word decrement? You really can learn things in a casino and the word decrement is one of them.

According to Webster.com decrement means "a gradual decrease in quality or quantity."

In the letter from Caesars, decrement was used this way:

Great Gift Wrap Up points are different from Reward Credits and will not decrement Reward Credits earned.

In other words, you GGWU points are separate from your Reward Credits and using the GGWU points won't affect your Reward Credits balance.

Now, my sentence might be longer that Caesars' sentence but at least I avoided having to use the word decrement and having everyone run to the dictionary to find out what decrement means.

Well, there is a positive here. From now on no one can say you can't learn something useful in a casino. I now know what decrement means.

Based on recent threads here, "excrement" rather than decrement might better describe the rewards credits.

We need an English major to tell us if decrement was used correctly in that letter?

Is "Great Gift Wrap Up points are different from Reward Credits and will not decrement Reward Credits earned" correct?

Or should it be: Great Gift Wrap Up points are different from Reward Credits and there will be no decrement of your Reward Credits earned?

Or should it be: Great Gift Wrap Up points are different from Reward Credits and there will be no decremental effect on our Reward Credits balance?

Edited to add: To be honest, one of the best things about the TV business is that we always use simple words and simple terms and we "write for the ear" so we avoid words such as two and too.

Mary Tyler Moore currently has a commercial running on radio in which she says "I have diabetes too." But this could cause some confusion because there are two types of diabetes -- diabetes type 1 which is insulin dependent or juvenile diabetes, or diabetes type 2 which is adult onset diabetes which may not be insulin dependent.

I happen to know that Mary Tyler Moore has type 1 diabetes, but just hearing her commercial you might not know if she has type 1 or type 2 because she says "I have diabetes too" which you might think means "I have diabetes two."

So, in TV we stay away from words like decrement, because it makes sense to do that.

Reminds me when years ago before being gay was "in", a candidate referred to another candidate's sister as a thespian because it sounded like lesbian which at that time was bad.

Actually Alan, decrement is a noun so they were wrong to use it as a verb. They should have said "will not cause a decrement".

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Originally Posted by regnis

Actually Alan, decrement is a noun so they were wrong to use it as a verb. They should have said "will not cause a decrement".

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Ahh... so their use of decrement turned into excrement?

What regnis said. Why would you pull a word like that out of your ass when you don't know what it actually means? It's a noun -- the opposite of increment. Now I'm pretty sure the writer would know enough to not say, "It won't increment your account." So why use decrement this way?

While I'm not a fan of jargon, it was creative for sports books to call a tie bet a "push." That seems appropriate.

Here's a use of casino jargon that has always bugged me. When you lose at the game of craps, you don't crap out, you seven out. When a shooter throws a craps he still holds the dice and has not lost his turn with the dice. He might have lost a bet (or won a bet) but he did not crap out. You only lose the dice when you seven-out.

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Originally Posted by redietz

Why would you pull a word like that out of your ass when you don't know what it actually means? It's a noun -- the opposite of increment. Now I'm pretty sure the writer would know enough to not say, "It won't increment your account." So why use decrement this way?

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My question is why would they use such an obscure word -- period?? I had no idea the word existed. Is there no one at Caesars who ever question the use of that? No manager, no proof reader, no intern, no MBA? Or did they all just stand around and say "oh yes, well written" and then wondered to themselves why the Emperor was wearing no clothes?

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Originally Posted by Alan Mendelson

My question is why would they use such an obscure word -- period?? I had no idea the word existed. Is there no one at Caesars who ever question the use of that? No manager, no proof reader, no intern, no MBA? Or did they all just stand around and say "oh yes, well written" and then wondered to themselves why the Emperor was wearing no clothes?

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Maybe they think they're being highbrow by using an obscure word. I always goof on Time magazines use of words that I've never heard used and have no idea what they mean, even in context. People probably just want to show off.

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Originally Posted by Alan Mendelson

Here's a use of casino jargon that has always bugged me. When you lose at the game of craps, you don't crap out, you seven out. When a shooter throws a craps he still holds the dice and has not lost his turn with the dice. He might have lost a bet (or won a bet) but he did not crap out. You only lose the dice when you seven-out.

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My pet peeve. As a lifetime craps player I cringe when someone says "he crapped out".

Decrement is both a noun and a verb. I would always encounter this term in my computer classes when referring to programming. e.g. Use a variable to decrement the counter keeping track of XYZ. For the noun, here is an example: My gambling bankroll is lower now due to several $10 decrements. Think of increments or decrements as a certain type of measuring unit.

Max is correct. Decrement as a verb is used quite often in programming.

Well, as of 20 years ago, decrement was strictly a noun. Now we have an array of words that folks have decided should be used as verbs.

Why use the word? There was a cool experiment (again) about 20 years ago featuring various versions of papers submitted to journals, each of which was fine-tuned on a scale of wordiness and difficulty to understand, but all of which said exactly the same thing. Of course, the journals were most likely to accept and praise the most convoluted and difficult to understand papers while rating the clearest, most concise papers as the least impressive.

Alan, back in our day, there was something called a Fog Index to assess writing. If you haven't heard of it, look it up -- it was useful.

So I should stop relying on my 1972 Webster?

Look, Alan's writer could have said "decrease" rather than "decrement." But that somehow wasn't good enough. The point of writing isn't to come up with something that'll be clear to the fewest people.

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Originally Posted by redietz

Look, Alan's writer could have said "decrease" rather than "decrement." But that somehow wasn't good enough. The point of writing isn't to come up with something that'll be clear to the fewest people.

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Wait--aren't you a lawyer too? That's our job.

In TV we try to use the simplest, easiest to understand words. It's also that way in advertising. Time is precious on TV. And you don't have much time to get your message across in advertising. So simplicity reigns.

In TV and advertising you can't expect the consumers of your writing to have the time to look up, decode, translate or decipher what you mean or intend to say.

So, when some marketing writer at Caesars uses the word decrement it tells me that the writer has too much time on his hands, and he must think the rest of us have enough time to decipher what he wrote.

If this "marketing writer" presented that letter to his college marketing professor for a grade, I am sure he would have received a "fail." The word might have been used properly, but why make the message complicated when you can make it simple?

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Originally Posted by redietz

Well, as of 20 years ago, decrement was strictly a noun. Now we have an array of words that folks have decided should be used as verbs.

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I've been programming since 1967 and I've been using decrement as a verb the entire time.

I'm going to guesstimate that less than 1% of the population uses that word. Ergo, unless you're Howard Cosell (of whom I must admit I was a big fan), it has no place in a general writing piece.

Next topic: who uses the word "purchase" instead of "buy?" And why would you?

"Alan's Best Purchases" --- has a catchy ring, eh?