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.