Many employees with whom I consult about work-related problems have an imprecise understanding of illegal discrimination. Rightly or wrongly, they believe that mostly all of the inconveniences which befall them at work or elsewhere, including instances of inclement weather, were caused because of some form of discrimination. Their misunderstanding of discrimination, I concluded, was mainly linguistic in origin. �Discrimination� is a nominalization of the verb �discriminate� as harassment is a nominalization of the verb �harass� (properly pronounced like the name Harris). By burying the verb within the noun, the writer of �discrimination� hides from the reader the action conveyed by �discriminate.� Hence: �The agency discriminated against me because I am a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant male� better conveys to the reader what the agency did to the writer than �I was a victim of discrimination because I am �� So the first injunction I make to consultees is that, henceforth, they will never use �discrimination,� but will use �discriminate� instead. But consultees do not usually understand what �discriminate� denotes, because they don�t see the verb �contrast� lurking within �discriminate.� If they did, they would reflexively look to see how the agency is treating them in comparison with how the agency is treating their co-workers. They perceive only that the agency has treated them badly and then scurry off by themselves to an EEO Counselor to initiate an informal complaint. I try to improve their comprehension of discrimination by first exchanging the noun phrase �disparate treatment� for �discrimination� and then converting the nominalization �treatment� to its verb form, infra.    more »