Vocabulary

"Severance pay" is what you call the money you pay someone when you fire them without them having done something wrong. Sometimes it's in their contract, sometimes it's a negotiated settlement and sometimes it comes about via a successful lawsuit on behalf of the person who got fired.

The common factor, though, is that you actually have to get fired, and in order to get fired, the employer you work for has to send you home without a job. They have to "sever," or cut off, your employment with them. At least, that's what I always thought, anyway, but I wasn't smart enough to get into the University of California at Berkeley, where it seems they use a different definition of "fired." That definition, instead of equating "getting fired" with "losing your job," equates it with "having another job created specifically for you even before your old job that you want severance pay for is officially gone."

On the one hand, one wonders how educational institutions can continue to function when they combine their embrace of the plantation system of collegiate athletics with corrupt business practices like this and add them both to their ever-increasing distance from actually teaching somebody something. On the other hand, the fact that I now know this new definition of "fired" proves that learning never really stops and that even a dim GPA two-pointer like me can be illuminated by the brilliance that emanates from UC Berkeley.