"You can swipe your card now!"
The definition has changed its meaning from the slang that once described the unauthorized taking of property. It has morphed into the action used to slide a credit/debit card through a reader slot to allow money to be deducted from an account number stored in a magnetic stripe. Swipe the stripe. It is stealing from yourself. It may not be stealing in the criminal sense but it is certainly taking money I don't have from the person who must pay it back whom happens to be one and the same. Deficit personal spending is comfort food for the therapeutic shopper. Just swipe what you need to feel better and you can delay the pay until you are dunned. We have learned this behavior from our national economy and it is the moral equivalent of simply printing money like the Fed. Abandoning the consequences, or denying the consequences, or kicking the can down the road is how swiping works. So its rock paper scissors for me. Put your card under a rock, use your scissors to disable the card, and use paper money instead of plastic. If it isnt debit don't use it. Save up for it and buy it with money you really have. Credit is a very misleading term which almost suggests that you win if you swipe; you are credited, awarded, given, or souvenir'd invisible money which grants you permission to have and hold anything you want. Swiping is pretend money and its plastic. You cannot swipe happiness. The stripe on the back of the card is the brain. It is a magnetic conscience that compels a swipe of pretend currency effortlessly and often without a cashier present so you can have anything you can swipe without discouraging word. At some indeterminate timepoint the pretense has to be righted and the swipe made real. Swipe once meant that you misappropriated somebody else's money. It still does.
