Bloviation and delusion. I'm increasingly convinced that anything I hear on news radio is all no more than bloviation and delusion.
Two things I heard this morning convinced me of this.
The first thing has been malleating at my incus for a while now, and I'm most likely as much as two decades too late to the angry mob on this one, but I want to literally puncture my timpanic membrane every time I hear Rush Limbaugh say "drive-by media" during one of the recap/teaser bits that get played each morning on "Macrini's Morning News Team," which is a show I actually enjoy very much.
Limbaugh obviously intends the term be insulting, but it infuriates me not because it offends but because it is inherently and extrinsically meaningless and because its appropriate replacement would be even more effectively insulting.
"Drive by" can mean one of two things, those being "passing by without noticing or engaging" or "attempted assassination from a moving vehicle." Limbaugh employs neither of these meanings in his coinage, nor can he because the news media undeniably notices and engages and does not assassinate anyone's character without sticking around for the days, weeks, or even years it requires to go methodically through the stages of annoying, wounding, killing, and dancing on the grave of its chosen targets.
What does Limbaugh intend to accuse news reporters of, then? Probably that reporters tend to focus only on the surface of a news event and then move on too quickly to cover another event. This would properly be characterized as "hit-and-run media," which is more damning and equally as euphonious.
I have no hope that Limbaugh will ever begin using the English language correctly. He is, after all, a big, fat idiot.
I used to have faint hope, however, that some people somewhere would sometimes use words in ways that indicated that those people knew what those words meant. That hope died a Studs Terkelian death this morning when I heard a fortuneteller tell an NPR interviewer that she believes the tarot readings she performs empower her clients to take control of their future.
Read that again.
Yes, a woman with a job title that explicitly states that "fortune" exists and can be "told" -- whose entire self-identity is predicated on her alleged mystical ability to descry the immutable future -- believes that people can determine their own fates.
I wonder if the fortuneteller foresaw me banging my forehead repeatedly into my desktop?
Yours malapropitiously,
Ed
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