CONFLUENCE — THE CON, NOW FLUENT IN THE MAINSTREAM

—THOUGHTS FROM THE RIVERBANK—

With Staff Correspondent:

I went down to the water to fish.

I’ve fished there before. It’s not a secret spot, just a place that used to be good enough if you knew what you were doing and didn’t expect too much. I had the rod in the car more out of habit than confidence.

Vito reels in a coelacanth—a fish long believed extinct, later found living quietly out of sight.
The Council specializes in noticing similar survivals.

That’s when I saw the signs.

Two of them, posted right at the water’s edge. Same warning. Same symbol. One in English, one in Spanish. Polite. Clear. Official. They didn’t scold you. They didn’t threaten you. They just told you not to eat what you caught.

I stood there a while reading them. The water looked calm enough. Nothing floating. Nothing obvious. But the signs were there because something upstream hadn’t been fixed. It had only been documented.

I’ve never been in prison. I don’t do things that earn you prison.

But I’ve worked in prisons. Long enough to recognize certain words when I hear them. Long enough to know which ones were built for bad conditions.

Standing there by the water, those words started showing up in my head—not because of the signs, but because I’d been hearing them all week somewhere else. Still, the language felt related: the same blunt, translated warnings, the same institutional voice that starts in enclosed places and eventually learns to speak everywhere.

On television.

Snitch.

Rat.

Lockdown.

Body count.

Shut it down.

Shout-out.

That last one sticks with me. Shout-out.

That’s a word that came from inside. You said it to mark allegiance. To remember someone. To signal where you stood. Now I hear it on the news, in interviews, even at academic panels, like it’s just another friendly gesture.

I don’t think these words get better when they leave the places they came from.

They were designed to survive pressure. That doesn’t make them clean.

Later, when I got home, I kept thinking about a word that fit what I’d been standing in without realizing it. I didn’t invent it. I looked it up in the Council dictionary. They keep track of these things.

The word was confluence.

Originally, it meant languages flowing together to make something stronger. Anglo-Saxon meeting Greek and Latin. Rough speech learning how to handle ideas that needed longer words. Science. Philosophy. Abstraction.

That kind of confluence went upstream. It clarified things.

But the modern usage felt different. Same mechanism. Worse water.

Prison and street language flowing outward into public speech—not as policy, but as seepage. Not to sharpen meaning, but to normalize the inmate-born grammar of intimidation, dominance, and survival. Words forged inside to navigate confinement now repeated calmly by people in suits, long after the context that gave them weight has been forgotten.

Fluent, but not improved.

Long before warning signs and advisories, there was another idea about language.
A fluent register addressed downward, not upward.
The monk lectures the fish—not because they are expected to understand, but because meaning was once believed to matter even when it was not absorbed. (Woodcut by George Sluyterman. **stromerhannes.thule-italia.org/Cartoline/a07.jpg)**

I thought about the signs again. English and Spanish side by side. Both descended from Latin in their own way. Both doing honest work. Warning you clearly. Translating danger so no one could say they didn’t understand.

That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was knowing that once you need signs like that, the water’s already changed. Translation doesn’t fix contamination. It just helps you navigate it.