Exemptions, Deductions, and Loopholes: Tax Day Vocabulary

Accountants keep financial records for businesses, individuals, and the secret worldwide Illuminati, probably. Many accountants also do people’s taxes. Accountants, as the name implies, keep track of accounts. You might have a checking account and savings account, but businesses have all sorts of accounts related to equipment, training, food, advertising, etc. They might even have a Swiss bank account—a term often used in jokes to indicate someone is hiding money from the feds.

This word is sweet music to the ears of taxpayers: when you have a deduction, you can trim your taxable income, which means fewer dollars owed and ulcers grown.

Lots of people have money problems: but only the truly poor are destitute. To be destitute is to have no money for food, shelter, or anything else. This has also been a word for people lacking more than money: you can destitute of friends, companionship, hope, and/or freedom. Many people are. Now I’m depressed. Let’s just move on.

Dough is an old word for the pasty stuff, made of flour or meal that gets molded and baked into bread. But since the mid-1800s, dough has also meant moolah.

If you’re a freelancer like myself, most of your jobs don’t take out any taxes. That gives you two choices: every April, pay the federal government a zillion dollars, including several pounds of flesh. The better option is to make estimated payments four times a year. To do that, you need to estimate how much you should pay. Estimating isn’t like guessing: it’s more like measuring, though not quite that exact.

An exemption is an exception: official permission to not do something you would normally have to do. People can get exemptions from jury duty, military service, and who knows what else; I’m a columnist, not a lawyer. In tax terms, an exemption creates a tax-free bubble around income or purchases.

Words for repellent things and words for enormous things have a tendency to overlap, and that’s how filthy came to describe the rich: specifically, people who have so much money it’s outrageous and obscene.

People complain a lot about the government on Tax Day. Well, they do that on all other days too, but complaints reach a peak on April 15 because the government collects those taxes.

Tax time isn’t always a nightmare. Some lucky folks pay too much tax during the year, so they get a refund. Since funds refers to money, this is a perfect word for money you get back. Refund is one of the happiest words in the language. It’s related to funding, which is the money that makes something happen.

You’ve probably heard rich folks described as wealthy: that means they have wealth. At minimum, this suggests what is technically referred to as “loads of dough.”