Tobacco to Kill a Billion? Not Good Enough.

Recent news stories make large of estimates that perhaps a billion people will be killed by tobacco in this century. So what? By the end of the century, all but a few of the youngest of us will be dead of something.

All tobacco does is reduce the average age at which its users and addicts die. Death at 70 rather than 90 has little effect on population.

Good-hearted but short-sighted people wail and gnash teeth because not everyone born lives three score and ten or better. Famine, AIDS, flood, earthquake, war, and bicycle accidents kill many well short of old age, and it's a good thing that's the case.

At six billion plus, the planet is overpopulated by a factor of eight or ten. Those events and circumstances that kill substantial numbers of us help push back the day of reckoning, but death by tobacco does the cause of population reduction only a little good.

The problem with tobacco is, it kills old people who have already produced their progeny. Car crashes are a better brake on future population; they tend to kill people young, before they breed.

However, as age of pregnancy drops, the effect of car crashes lessens. Maybe we should reduce the driving age to twelve. For the greater good of humanity, of course.

Smoke 'em if you've got 'em.

Word Errors: jury-rigged, jerry-built

The most common screwup on these terms is mixing them: 'jerry-rigged' or sometimes 'jury-built'. I saw 'jerry-rigged' recently in The New Yorker and in an interview in the literary magazine, The Sun.

Jury-rigged means temporarily repaired with materials not intended for their new use. Break the mast of your small sailboat, and you could jury-rig a mast with an oar.

Jerry-built means slapped together with materials at hand, or poorly constructed from substandard materials.