Thursday, September 01, 2005

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.

5 comments:

d.K. said...

I'm still in the denial phase of this tragedy. Anger, so I'm told, comes next.

Capt. Fogg said...

Oh I'm well into the anger thing. What keeps me there is not that our country is run by Ali Baba and the 40 thieves, but that his supporters are out there waving the same old flags. The latest is that it's Clinton's fault for not fixing up the levee years ago.

Bush supporters are the greatest enemy this country has ever faced.

Crankyboy said...

From Drudge Report:

Eyewitness: Sec of State Condi Rice laughs it up at 'Spamalot' while Gulf Coast lays in tatters. Theater goers on New York' City's Great White Way were shocked to see the President's former National Security Advisor at the Monty Python farce last night -- as the rest of the cabinet responds to Hurricane Katrina...

These people are awful.

Capt. Fogg said...

So many of my friends are ex-military die hard Republicans and you should hear them griping about Bush's eating cake while New Orleans drowns. I've never heard anything like it.

That anonymous geek that is smelling up some of my posts here may be the last holdout. Maybe he doesn't get the news out there in his shack in Montana. . .

Capt. Fogg said...

I can't prove racism, but incompetence is obvious. Even my died-in-the-wool Republican military friends are calling Bush incompetent today. The Feds have simply abandoned the city and according to Hastert, don't even think it sould be rebuilt. People are dying as you read this.