Punster, humorist, author, journalist, one Edwin Neumann (1919-2010) delighted us with his observations and love of language and news. His best-seller Strictly Speaking: Will American Be the Death of English? became a classic. It invited me to laugh at my own lazy use of language and that of others, both a curse and delight.

In keeping with the Neumann tradition, some recent usage horrors are difficult to overlook or underhear. They really clank. For example, consider one of the zombie language changes creeping into our local television weather reporters’ mouths and brains.

“Rain will develop overnight.” That sentence, or its variations such as “We can expect rain overnight” or “Up to an inch of rain will fall overnight,” have held firm for decades as a simple, direct, sentence. But now a new entrant has entered the meteorological field.

“Rain will develop in THE overnight.” A perfectly good adverb is suddenly wrestled and shape shifted into a noun. But this differs from the usual language changes. American English loves inventing new expressions by changing a word from one part of speech to another. Most often, American English loves finding ways to shorten language. This habit shows up in another local weather forecasting favorite, as in this sentence. “Temperatures will remain relatively unchanged in the metro.” Except for the proper name of a subway or underground, “metro” serves as an abbreviated adjective for “metropolitan.” Thus, in the recent past, listeners could hear, “Temperatures will remain relatively unchanged in the metro area.” Saying “the metro” instead of “the metro area” not only shortens the sentence by eliminating the fairly abstract word “area,” but also it puts emphasis where it should be, on the more concrete and specific “metro,” which occupies the key place of emphasis at the end of the sentence. That’s all well and good.

“The overnight,” works counter to that. “The” adds, rather than subtracts, an abstract word to the sentence. Instead of simply being a strong adverb, nestled directly up against the verb, now we’ve complicated the entire sentence by adding an entire prepositional phrase, “in the overnight” to answer the question of when the rain will happen.

We could push this zombified language even further. In changing “overnight” from an adverb to a noun, we’ve made “overnight” into a thing rather than a when. It’s almost as if “overnight,” the thing, is pregnant with the rain that it is carrying inside. You just can’t trust those overnights and what they do overnight!

If the Alpha dog weather forecaster begins to use this expression, it will probably only spread to all the others as they compete and jockey for position. I suspect “in THE overnight” sounds more sophisticated to the ears of these speakers, much in the way that the ungrammatical “I” used in place of “me” has spread through the air waves, or the way the word “homage” is mispronounced. The word is pronounced “om’ij,” but now in just the past few years announcers are converting it into “oh’maj.” Oh my! There ain’t no such animal. But I suspect that saying it that way makes speakers think of themselves as sounding more sophisticated in a Frenchified sort of way. Zombie Ego.