CNN; the soul of solecism

There’s one thing I share with Supreme Court Nominee Roberts; I’m a language grouch. So yesterday when some newly minted TV journalist used the word enormity to describe the devastation on the Gulf Coast, I almost bit my tongue off. And then he used it again, emphasizing it as though we would be impressed with his erudition.

Enormity, in the dear, dead days before a dictionary was just a compendium of popular malapropisms, referred to a monstrous wickedness and not to the physical size of something, but while I was about to type out my list of frequent CNN solecisms, it occurred to me that perhaps enormity was just the word after all.

New Orleans only got a glancing blow from Katrina. At first the report was that the city was spared, (the power of prayer was cited more than once) yet soon the levees failed and the city was inundated. Looking through archives of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, it seems that for years, the city had been pleading for assistance with raising the levees that had been slowly sinking and deteriorating. The work was begun and then funding was cut off as Bush’s tax cuts and military adventures diverted our priorities. The massive corruption in Homeland Security that followed, channeled hundreds of millions into a cosmic worm hole connected to shadowy interests on the other side of the universe. The levee system remained inadequate.

So enormity it is and the enormousness of the enormity seems to grow with each new report. The death of a unique American city has something to do with Mother Nature and something to do with a monstrous wickedness called the Bush Administration.