Pre-Ramble:  According to my MSNBC homepage, the East Coast is “bracing for a potent March snow storm,” and “a rare snow blanketed the South, prompting over 200 churches in the central part of the Bible Belt to cancel morning services.”  As I look out over our freshly shoveled driveway, I am given pause to consider the relative aspects of these reports. This kind of challenging weather is an everyday occurence here in Minnesota… In fact, the Twin Cities just bounced back from a doozy of a storm that introduced eight inches of  the fresh white fluffy stuff into the evening commute. No big deal. We can handle it. True Minnesotans actually get crabby if a winter season doesn’t have its share of noteworthy weather. Our poor kids never get a snow day.

One thing I’ve noticed is that weather reports definitely have their share of blowing and drifting verbiage … not unlike news reports that throw around unnecessarily inflammatory words to describe current economic conditions (a topic I have discussed in a couple of recent blogs; 2/17 and 2/4).

By the way: A few more additions to the ongoing list of Unnecessarily Inflammatory Words… hobbled, soured, trepidation, turmoil, pervasive, pernicious, faltering, rescue, negative, contenders, beleaguered, buffeted, Buffetted*(* I just made that one up), brink, failure, hit (as in “take a major”), difficult, uncharted, teeter, free-fall, and the week’s top characterization expressed by Christina Romer, chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisors, “Obama administration officials have been watching ‘in horror’ what’s been going on around the world.”

Apparently, major economic indexes have tumbled to their lowest levels in twelve years and for the sixth straight month, the Dow Jones industrial average has fallen — and is now teetering — at less than half of its all-time record worth of 14,165. That’s gotta be bad news – unless you’re on a playground, teetering is never good.

The Take-Away: Sure, the economic climate is looking a little rough. It’s probably going to take a while to dig out from this one. But, like a big snow storm, it doesn’t really do any good to panic. Heck — we’re tough — we don’t need no stinkin’ snow days!  Buckle down, bundle up, and look on the bright side – the economy might not be warming up as quickly as we might have hoped, but there’s still a good chance that we could get another few nasty weather events before the fishing opener!

Pre-Ramble: Just when I thought I was being a mere smarty-pants, the Universe shoots back with a zinger. In a recent blog posting (Feb. 4, The sky is falling) I suggested that the media’s use of inflammatory words to describe the current economic conditions was only making matters worse. I gave a laundry list of words that the media should be forbidden to use unless they were covering “submarine maneuvers, roller-coasters, or souffles.” 

Well, sure ’nuff, a report out of the BBC today indicates that a Royal Navy nuclear submarine was involved in a collision with a French nuclear sub in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. 

Apparently, the HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant (pictured above right) were “badly damaged in the crash in heavy seas.” While no injuries or explosions were reported, ”very visible dents and scrapes” could be seen as the vessels returned to port. Descriptions of the incident range from subdued to ballistic including:

• “incredibly embarrassing”  …
• “clearly a one-in-a-million chance when you think about how big the Atlantic is” …
• “lessons are being learned” …
• “a nuclear nightmare of the highest order” …
• “these submarines should not have been in the same place at the same time” …
• “The Ministry of Defense needs to explain how it is possible for a submarine carrying weapons of mass destruction to [accidently] collide with another submarine carrying weapons of mass destruction in the middle of the world’s second-largest ocean” …
• and the massively understated, “if there ever were to be a bang, it would be a mighty big one…”

The Take-Away:  The submarine incident kind of blows my earlier point right out of the water. I was planning to update you with a new batch of negatively charged words mined from recent financial reports including bleak, warning, catastrophe, skid, deepening, dashed, volatile, shed, apocalypse, stampede, retail-space-available, shaken, bail-out, shambles, and brother-can-you-spare-a-dime.

Pre-Ramble: In the interest of aiding the ailing economy, President Obama should supersede the First Amendment and ban the media from using the following words unless they are covering submarine maneuvers, roller-coasters, or souffles:

Ailing, fall, crash, drop, plunge, plummet, nose-dive, decline, downturn, sinking, slide, slump, spasm, outflow, dip, dent, recession, depression, hopeless, despair, gloom, doom, misery, woes, intensified, large-scale, cut-backs, lower-than-expected, sharp-drop, blackened, dark, evaporated, cratered, tanking, slashing, frenzy, collapse, stoppage, quagmire, topsy-turvy, crisis, struggle, battered, disgruntled, barrage, mangy, flagging, weakness, suffer, staggering, losses, dismal, unnerving, reckless, trauma, loser, bust, tumble, stumble, wallow, bottomed-out, hemorrhaging, critical, not-so-good, worse, suck, clench, jolt, shudder, yank, twitching, default, implode, undermine, fanning-the-flames, massive, destruction, troubled, vast, unsustainable, alarming, magnitude, fearful, scared, scarred, anxious, jobless, yipes, nervous, thrashing, trouncing, failure, demise, closure, deflated, epic, stupor and grim.

The Take-Away: The constant barrage use of Chicken Little language will only make things worse less good. Please suggest any other words that need to be added to the master list.