Quite a while back, I found fault with use of the word "fungible" in TIME which said
"Loyalties in Afghanistan are fungible". Fungible is basically a legal term for commodities
that are interchangeable - any ton of wheat can be substituted for another ton of
wheat in securing a loan.
Today I encountered the word referring to an obstration in a way which I can accept:

Of course, such accounts of modernization, like all stories cultures tell about themselves,
combine historical truths with a certain degree of myth-making. Theorists have assigned
the clock a metaphorical role in the modernization of Western life that extends far beyond
its functional value as a particular machine; as Mumford would have it, the clock "marks a
perfection toward which other machines aspire." [19] As a result, the clock has become
what Hayden White calls a "verbal artifact" of a certain way of thinking about modernity,
a trope that, when unpacked, reveals some of the underlying values and presumptions
implicit in that way of thinking. [20] In large part, the clock's "perfection" as a modern
artifact has been located in its ability to rationalize time intocountable and
fungible units, a process that aligns the clock in a theoretical way with
the frameworkof modernity as historians and philosophers have defined it.
[21] Both proponents and critics of modernity have consistently identified the
abstraction of time and space into grids based not on nature but on human
reason as central developments in Western culture over the past four hundred
years. The result of such rationalization, the theorists tell us, is a world made
over to suit the needs of a capitalist market.