My favorite part of “The Princess Bride” is when Vizzini, a sly criminal mastermind who is not that sly nor much of a mastermind, responds over and over to events with a shout of “Inconceivable!”

The swordsman Inigo Montoya — brilliantly played by Mandy Patinkin — eventually looks at his boss quizzically.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

The line runs through my head frequently these days. It’s usually when I hear the word “fraud.”

The simple definition of fraud is a deception for personal or financial gain. The legal definition, per Black’s Law Dictionary, is a scheme “to get an advantage over another by false suggestions or suppression of the truth.”

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk claim to have found an absolute avalanche of fraud. When asked for examples, press secretary Karoline Leavitt points to things such as contracts for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and climate change.

In his joint session speech last week, Trump mentioned a foreign aid program for male circumcision in Mozambique. Musk made the United States Agency for International Development one of his earliest targets because he called the non-governmental organizations frequently contracted “one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world.”

It doesn’t matter if the programs were legally contracted or even if they were authorized by Congress, the branch of government that decides what America is paying to do and why. They are simply stamped with the scarlet letter F.

It seems that anything one doesn’t like can now be called a fraud. Musk described Social Security as a Ponzi scheme. If so, it’s a Ponzi scheme that is the only thing keeping many seniors from starving to death. It’s a legally constituted program that millions of Americans have paid into for generations. It doesn’t matter. It is now tarred as fraudulent.

Let’s be clear. I believe fraud happens in our government. Take the pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program, in which boatloads of money were taken, often by people who had no paychecks to protect. The Small Business Administration’s inspector general said in 2023 that about 70,000 of the loans made under it were possibly fraudulent.

I believe these things have happened under both parties. I believe it has happened in a bipartisan fashion. I believe it has probably been committed in some way since the ink was still wet on the Constitution. In fact, one of George Washington’s cronies, second to Alexander Hamilton, was one of our first insider traders.

But that doesn’t mean everything the government does represents fraud.

When we apply the word to programs that are simply not in keeping with the current administration’s goals, it devalues the government’s broader authority. It means what the government says today means nothing tomorrow. It means signing a document with the government has no lasting bonds between parties.

And it makes people look like a foolish, overpuffed huckster in a kids’ movie, continually using a word without understanding its meaning.