今日取り上げるNUDGE by R. H.Thaler and C. R. Susteinに出てきた "fraught" もこれまでにもどこかで何度か見ている気がしますが、意味を覚えていない単語です。
Often market competition will do a lot of good. But in some cases, companies have a strong incentive to cater to people's frailties and to exploit them.
Notice first that many insurance products have all of the fraught features that we have sketched. The benefits from holding the insurance are delayed, the probability of having a claim is hard to analyze, consumers do not get useful feedback on whether they are getting a good return on their insurance purchases, and the mapping from what they are buying to what they are getting can be ambiguous. But the insurance market is competitive, so a natural question to ask is whether market forces can be relied upon to "solve" the problem of fraught choices.
"fraught" は名詞、動詞、形容詞になりますが、とりあえず形容詞の意味を辞書でみます。
・Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary:
a. full of or accompanied by something specified ?used with with: a situation fraught with danger: every room in my childhood home is fraught with memories
b. causing or characterized by emotional distress or tension : uneasy: a fraught relationship: had a fraught meeting with his estranged wife to discuss a divorce settlement
V2 Vocabulary Building Dictionaryに由来にも言及した分かり易い説明がありました。
Tips: The modern definition of fraught is derived from the 14th century English fraught, “to load with cargo." For a memory trick, note how fraught is similar in spelling and sound to freight. Now, in line with the idea of loading something with cargo, think of a freight train fraught (overloaded) with cargo, but think of emotional cargo or baggage--it should be used for intangibles (fraught with anxiety, fraught with mistakes) and not tangibles. Fraught can also mean "uneasy, charged, or stressed." Think of the stress of having to hold something heavy or being overloaded with something. Fraught is also similar in meaning and application to rife.
これで. "fraught" は覚えられそうだ。