The Price Tag

The program's vocabulary is everywhere — serenity on kitchen signs, gratitude in January marketing, one day at a time on anything that holds coffee. The capture is not mockery; it is admiration with the price removed. Bill described where the words came from (A.A. Comes of Age): the new road signs read, "This way to sanity and serenity. The price is self-sacrifice." The copies keep the destination and omit the toll — and the toll is the working part: "The spiritual substance of anonymity is sacrifice." A word that costs nothing teaches nothing; serenity without the surrender underneath it is a font choice. This is how a spiritual language gets hollowed — not banned, not argued with: retailed. The answer is not to chase down every mug. It is to keep paying, quietly, the price the mug leaves off, so the words still mean something on the day a dying drinker reads them.