ABSTRACT
A familiar nonsense phrase—"it almost doesn't matter"—seems to be making a comeback. News stories say the budget deficit is so low that "it almost doesn't matter" whether it is eliminated. The phrase shows up in crime stories too, mostly to indicate that we shouldn't care whether or not a defendant is guilty. As a rule, use of the "almost" phrase indicates that someone is in the process of selling you snake oil, so it is best to turn off your hearing aid quickly and check to see if your wallet is still there. The two most famous perpetrations of things that allegedly don't seem to matter occurred in the 1980s. Newsweek made the mistake of paying big money for newly discovered diaries of Adolf Hitler, but the diaries turned out to be fake. The other triumph of the Eighties involved another hoax, Tawana Brawley's claim that she was kidnapped and raped by white law enforcement officers.
