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“She’s not going to change,” I say. “She’s incorrigible.”
“What does incorrigible mean?” Christina asks.
A mild panic overtakes me. I was just trying to spice up our dinner conversation with one of those five-dollar words, but Christina has called my bluff. I do not know what incorrigible means, and so I do what comes naturally. I bullshit.
“It’s an old-timey word,” I say. “It was in popular use in England at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.”
I stumble through a brief history of industrialization. The gist is this: people used to work on farms, then factories became a thing, which disrupted the social fabric of the agrarian economy, which resulted in some people, who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, for whatever reason—brutal labor conditions, mental illness, poverty …
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