The Stupid Syndrome

On Memorial Day, I found several things bouncing around the Internet and the world's wire service press reports that established a new level of illiteracy and ignorance.

Three wire services referred to the "mayhem" created by a piece of constructyion equipment tracking that sounded like gunfire in the Capital's Rayburn officer building.

No human being was injured during the "crisis" in the least way.

Incidentally "capital" is Washingtion and "capitol" is the building !)

Well, here's what "mayhem" is (Webster's Unabridged):


mayhem: One entry found for mayhem.
Main Entry: may·hem Pronunciation: 'mA-"hem, 'mA-&mFunction: nounEtymology: Middle English mayme, from Anglo-French mahaim, from Old French, loss of a limb, from maynier to maim, probably of Germanic origin; akin to Middle High German meiden gelding, Old Norse meitha to injure1 a : willful and permanent deprivation of a bodily member resulting in the impairment of a person's fighting ability b : willful and permanent crippling, mutilation, or disfigurement of any part of the body.

I point this out because my night city editor nearly 60 years ago, Sam Cox, who did NOT finish Harvard or Yale, could not ABIDE sloppy l;azy writers and beat us around the ears with a bloody buzzard's gut when we used a "color" word incorrectly.

There is no brake or bridle on these lazy minded liberal leftwing louts and splenetic inciters of the fabricating amtiquer media nowadays.

They also do not know the meaning of decimate which they use in attept to magnify casualty reports.

If a troop of 100 is "decimated", it loses tem men, not necessarily any of them fatally, according to the dictionary definition.

All I want to suggest here is:

If they don't know what the words mean, then should we believe anything they write? Or say?