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Smart TalkSmart Talk SMART TALK
By  Dr. Verbos Metikulos



ENORMITY: Patients arrive at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired insisting that enormity means great size. These are often the same pseudo-intellectuals who think one waits with baited breath. At least, this one makes me laugh every time, as I wonder what this blowhard baits his breath with. Bated breath is short for “abated breath,” as in held with anxious anticipation.

Enormity means the quality of being outrageous, horribly criminal, wicked, or an extreme injustice or offense, as in “the enormity of the crime,” or “the enormity of attacking the wrong country while letting Osama go.”

I try to sympathize with my patients, because the sound of a word can confuse. Noisome, for instance, has nothing to do with noise. It come from the same root as “annoying,” and means very annoying to the nose, or stinky, as in a noisome manure lagoon on a dairy farm.

The smell is usually well controlled, however, so no enormity has been committed.

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