Although there’s some room for interpretation with this wording, I think most reasonable interpretations make the Milling mechanic entirely unusable – if you don’t believe the target player has done something that matches a word on the EFF wordlist, the action might end up failing as a consequence – and because the names of Sins are flavour text, it may be impossible to view anyone as having performed any of them because they have no meaning beyond being a string of characters, and you can’t view someone as having performed a meaningless string of characters.

I think the fact that they are flavor text is exactly what allows this to work. Your “belief in the Sin” is meaningless so it doesn’t matter what the Sin actually is, giving you the freedom to pick anything.

@JonathanDark: I agree that it’s probably meaningless, but in recent dynasties, haven’t we been typically viewing meaningless requirements as impossible to satisfy, rather than as being trivially satisfied?

It’s just last month (technically – start of February to end of March is almost two months) that this happened, in which a rule had an otherwise meaningful requirement expressed with a plural rather than singular verb, and some players (including you) argued that that made the requirement unsatisfiable – an action that attempted to comply with the requirement would probably have been reverted by CFJ (but the dynasty ended, making the CFJ moot). Having a requirement that’s explicitly meaningless seems like it would be even more likely to make the requirement unsatisfiable.

@ais523 “if you don’t believe the target player has done something that matches a word on the EFF wordlist, the action might end up failing as a consequence” This scenario could never happen because by choosing a Sin and writing it in your edit summary you are indicating that you view the Nomicer has having performed that Sin, so it would be nonsense for anyone to object on the grounds that you “don’t believe it”. Also there’s no way to prove that, so such an objection would be unactionable. Besides, you can always choose a sin that no one could possibly object to (blinking, eating, voting, etc).

I would be more concerned about the fact that it’s unclear whether a word counts as a Sin only if it’s on the List of Sins, or if every word ever used as a Sin counts whether or not they’re on the list. Because the latter would be very annoying to track, since you’re only allowed to add a Sin to the list of Sins optionally at the time you Record the sin, and not retroactively later.