Brandishing a dictionary, the senator looked up a definition of "a derivative", a term referring to the complex futures contracts used in the energy markets to hedge the risks associated with holding physical supplies of commodities such as oil and natural gas. The dictionary told him that it was "the limit of the ratio of the change in a function to the corresponding change in its independent variable as the latter change approaches zero".
Mr Lott turned to his colleagues with a warning: "We don't know what we are doing here. I have serious doubts how many senators really understand [this] and it sounds pretty complicated to me."
