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(ALERT:  What follows is intentional overuse of big words.  Get your dictionary ready, friends.)

I sincerely doubt that anyone will ever haul me into court accusing me of pitch-perfect application of the English language. I did my undergraduate work in Sociology, not English.  Consequently, I have held no illusions that I would one day become the next internationally renown author of the "Great American Novel."  Writing long-winded, excruciatingly detailed, ponderously boring reports comes naturally.  Debate is innate.  But lilting, rightly crafted prose?  That, as I have been told, is a real struggle for a gasbag the likes of me.  (Or is it "I"?)

Have I ever been a credible purveyor of the Queen's English in daily life?  Barely.  Growing up in the South Philly region poisoned me for life with a genetically grounded propensity to shorten words inappropriately, dropping a few too many "g"s from words otherwise ending in "ing."  Further, though I have been known to occasionally play at being a wordsmith, my income these past two decades has been largely based on my success manipulating bits, bytes, bandwidth, and the fine art of coaching tomorrow's leaders, not my overpowering prowess with simile, syntax, and structure.

Nevertheless, this knowledge will not stop me from bellying up to my God-given responsibility, doing my part to protect the vast, unaware proletariat from eviscerating the effervescence of effective English under the blunted blade of a lazy lingua.

Perhaps I am merely living up to the hopes and dreams of my late mother-in-law.   As a retired teacher and former English major she never missed an opportunity to insure that I paid proper respect to the use of such benchmark components of speech as "good" and "well," as in, "I am doing well", not, "I am doing good." 

(A sadly belated "Thank you," Ruth Edna, for insuring that your son-in-law broke free from his Philly cheese steak moorings to bask in the glow of an occasionally more refined presentation.)

There are now some applications of our native tongue that even I - a professional geek and sometime leadership development wonk - immediately recognize as sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.  My eyes have been widened to the prickly reality that although some words "can" be used in certain contexts they most certainly should not.

Take the word, "hugely," for example.

"Hugely" has taken on such popularity in recent years that it is now employed unreservedly by the few remaining papers and magazines of any repute. Our overuse of the word "hugely" has assumed the epic proportions previously reserved for that other, equally bludgeoned blurb, "disparate."

Imagine my shock when - while scanning through the Philadelphia Inquirer - I noticed the following phrase on the Op-Ed page of that venerable protector of the fourth estate...

"It is a hugely important matter..."

A "hugely important matter" indeed.

Times were that the word "huge" described the physical dimensions of objects such as the Empire State Building, Howard Hughes' "Spruce Goose," or even the infinitely burgeoning girth of comic Louie Anderson.  I recall that once upon a time I had a "huge" cyst on my back that fairly screamed out for surgical removal.  An appropriate use of the word "huge" if ever there were one.  I looked like Quasimodo, Jr.

These days, however, the word "huge" has fallen prey to overuse by those for whom vacuous brevity amplifies breathless urgency.

In recent years the word "huge" has taken on the "ly" appendage to become a form of shorthand substitute for the more appropriate, though seemingly dated, "enormous."  Yes, "hugely" now even holds its own place of prominence in many, though not all, reputable dictionaries.

Where once we talked of the "enormity" of the task at hand we now speak of a "hugely" important undertaking.

Is it just me, or does it seem as if we are letting down our intellectual guard, dumbing down our speech and language to appeal to that portion of the adult populace whose linguistic development cramped in perpetual rigor at the end of the fifth grade?  Is our job as communicators to pander to the lowest common rung on the educational ladder of life or must we do our best to set a better example, urging people toward richer, more studied intellectual growth?

It is with this slide into dimwitted denouement of the mother tongue firmly in mind that I now pitch my equivalent of a linguistic hissy fit.

May I suggest, the next time you find yourself struggling to employ a word that represents the enormity of a challenge ahead, that you actually use a derivation of the word...  (gasp!)...  "enormous"? The word for which you are searching - and I intend this for you, members of the talking head and pundit set - is "enormously," or perhaps even, "vastly". 

The distinction is huge.