Well, it's nice to know that, as we begin a new administration, presidents continue to bring out the grammar wonks in us all.
Mary Schmich
January 23, 2009
A few months ago, before Barack Obama became the linguist-in-chief, I made a note to myself to write a column about the need to exterminate a pest.
The pest kept popping up in my TV. In my e-mail inbox. In the mouths of people far more eloquent than I.
The pest's name: enormity.
The problem wasn't new, but it seemed to be multiplying like mice. Suddenly, all sorts of people, pundits especially, were tossing "enormity" around with abandon. The enormity of the economic crisis. The enormity of the housing crisis, the layoff crisis, the banking crisis, various foreign relations imbroglios and Donald Trump's ego. Every time another pundit said the word, I winced, not out of fear for my 401(k) but because I saw a battalion of newspaper editors and college professors, led by my 6th-grade teacher, Miss Birch, rapping on the pundits' enormous brains and shouting, "Enormity does not mean it's big!"
Because I was browbeaten in my formative years by such language warriors, I felt called to crusade to restore "enormity" to its proper meaning: "monstrous wickedness."
But I didn't get around to the crusade before Obama was elected, and now the truth is too huge to avoid: The battle is lost.
"I do not underestimate the enormity of the task that lies ahead," Obama told the Grant Park crowd at his November acceptance speech.
Last Sunday, he violated Miss Birch's rule again, in a speech at the Lincoln Memorial. "Despite the enormity of the task that lies ahead," he said, "I stand here today as hopeful as ever that the United States of America will endure."
When the president of the United States—Harvard lawyer, deft writer, one of the most powerful people in the world—tells Miss Birch it's time to change, well, she might.
But not without grumbling.
" 'Enormity,' " says the Chicago Tribune stylebook, "refers to great wickedness or outrageousness: the enormity of the crime. "Enormousness" refers to size: the enormousness of the tent." The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, however, sniffs at such stickling: "Those who urge such a limitation may not recognize the subtlety with which 'enormity' is actually used." [...]
I feel her pain, really I do. I cannot say how many times I've felt the urge to shout, "It's NU-CLE-AR, dumbass!" or "There is no such word as 'irregardless'!" But alas! the days of such picayune grammar wonkiness are passing. Absolute precision in our shared lexicon is becoming a lost art. Knowledge of all the parts of our language is vanishing into the haze.
And someday, when we're trying to express something very precise, and we're left struggling and thinking, "Wait, there's a word for that, isn't there?" only then will the antique among us comprehend the full enormity of the sins committed against our particular language.
We will probably gloat. The antique can be petty like that.
Posted by iain at January 23, 2009 06:19 PM
