Trying Too Hard

A recent CNN.com story regurgitating GOP hand-wringing over the large size of stimulus package manages to torpedo the one redeeming feature of the piece, the headline "Numb and number: Is trillion the new billion?" by explaining the pun in the text:

" 'Number' itself can be parsed 'number' or 'numb-er.' And maybe in this case, the latter is a better pronunciation," [Temple University Professor John Allen] Paulos said.

The piece does get a bit better in the end by saying that the large numbers are necessary to deal with the large pile of shit that is the U.S. economy, but then flounders with a concluding sentence that makes no grammatical sense. In all, CNN would have been better off not running the story at all.