I have another pet peeve. It's the word access. Or more precisely, it's the 
way we use the word access. We say, "You need a password to access this 
file," or "Once you've accessed the information, you need to forward it to 
your grandmother." THIS IS INCORRECT.

Access, you see, is a noun. Nouns, as you may recall from far away grammar 
lessons, are people, places, and things. You can do stuff with and to nouns, 
but you cannot have a noun be the action in your words. Saying, "I accessed 
my account," is the same as saying, "I doored my account." You can open a 
door.
You can gain access, have access, deny access, desire access, block access, 
booby-trap access, even lose access. But you can't access.

Unless of course access is a prefix, the start of a word. Then you could say, 
"I accessorized my account," meaning, "I added accessories to my account." 
This brings up the sticky issue of "accessory" as a legal term, which we all 
know is a bad thing. It's something the law dreamed up to keep good people 
from doing nothing. This, as the fundamentalist fruitcakes tell us, is all 
that is necessary for evil to triumph: for good people to do nothing. Thus we 
may conclude that law is a tool of fundametalist fruitcakes.

That's called a syllogism, by the way. A compiling of true statements that 
lead to a false conclusion. Syllogisms are fun. Try this one:

1) All rats have noses. 
2) Gary Bauer has a nose. 
conclusion 
3) Gary Bauer is a rat.

Wasn't that fun? This is a great party game. It should come after the 
intitial drink so that people are relaxed enough to play, but before they get 
so drunk they're more interested in playing pass the grape. Pass the grape is 
a game that involves gaining access to another person's mouth so you can 
deposit a
grape into it. As you might guess, the access is the important part, not the 
grape. There's another important point to this game, and that is exactly 
whose mouth you are getting into. This is why you should never invite 
fundamentalist fruitcakes to your parties. Once you let them into your mouth, 
it's only a
short step to granting them access to your laws. One might argue that this 
isn't necessarily a bad thing, that the legal system in this country was 
designed to allow everyone to participate, but I've noticed that fruitcake 
laws tend to all be about one thing: denying other people access.

We have the case in Mississippi where a fruitcake law is denying a father and 
son access to each other. We have a fruitcake law trying to get off the 
ground in California, denying same-sex couples, who might have gotten legally 
hitched in another state (once, of course, some state does recognize same-sex 
marriage) any sort of recognition from California. We have a fruitcake 
prohibition in Arizona which denies clean needles to addicts.

Fundamentalist fruitcakes seem to think that if they keep making these laws 
that deny what they have to other folk, that the other folk will become just 
like them. This is like closing your eyes so that no one can see you. And I'm 
sure you all can imagine how difficult it is to gain access to anything with 
your eyes closed.