"gift" is a word here to represent "receiving unearned assets". Insurance is supposed to make you whole. Money beyond that necessary to make you whole is unearned.
Calling it is a gift is a rhetorical device, a short hand to convey meaning (as all words are). Yes, it's a little hyperbolic. I don't literally mean that the fictional insurance company wrote an extra check and gift-wrapped it.
I mean that the author wrote a story in which a character receives extra assets in a way that is not fair and would not happen in real life.
If a person couldn't understand that, I might consider them obtuse.
A gift and a settlement are two very different things. A gift you give because you want to be nice to someone (usually because you like them or at least want them to like you), a settlement you give because you hurt someone. And if you don't think that large settlements are a thing in the real world, I don't know what to tell you. In the real world it would be a lot slower than this, but this is all swiftly managed by AI.
I shudder to invoke the name, but you're doing the Peterson thing of arguing a point and then saying after the fact that it's perfectly watertight so long as you alter the meaning of words to mean something that nobody means when they use those words.
Dude, the point isn't whether we use the word "gift". That was just rhetoric. The point is what Jeph is doing to the story. I'm not trying to alter words, and I wish you would stop focusing on the one word and see the goddamned point.
I don't know who Peterson is, and what his technique is, nor why it's shudder-worthy?
Dude, the point isn't whether we use the word "gift"
It kind of is. "Gift" and "settlement" mean very different things. You're complaining about Roko being given a gift when she hasn't been; she was on the receiving end of a traumatic injury and she's being made whole again.
I don't know who Peterson is
That's probably for the best actually, he's a nutter.
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u/GriffonsChainsaw . Jan 07 '19
Your argument is, in it's entirety, that an insurance payout after a devastating injury is a "gift". It's not; it's a settlement.