In this week's edition of his BBC Radio 4 broadcast, Tina Brown's slave-hubby Harold Evans continues to give the U.S. of A. some more head, going down on Katrina and fellating the event into a lengthy speech on American semantics. Specifically, Harry finds perhaps the only positive outcome from the devastating hurricane, as the media is abandoning all sorts of fluff terms and calling poor people exactly what they are: poor. We're not even sure what that means, but it sounds fascinating! After the jump, Henry the Intern's weekly report.

This week Harold Evans demonstrated how to parlay a would-be essay about the victims of Hurricane Katrina into a discussion about the "somewhat happier fall-out" of its repercussions on the English language, "a benevolence affecting us all."

The essay began with Harold recalling the time when "the poor" in America "were constantly being rescued by euphemism." Thanks to Katrina, Harold declared, journalists and politicos need not hide behind terms like needy, deprived, underprivileged or disadvantaged because now it is "not only permissible but mandatory" to "speak and write of poverty and poor people."

Harold, for one, was relieved: "The political left considered it would at least confer some dignity on the poor to give them a new suit of nouns and adjectives every few years, and the right never liked talking about the poor anyway."

Harold choose not to talk about the plight of the poor, instead he talked about talking about "the poor." He preferred to spit out zingers such as, "Americans don't have a monopoly of circumlocution" and "prepositional verbs grow like toadstools," even on big words like "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious."

Harold veered into the land of minutiae. "I was told that BBC Radio 4 listeners have particularly acute antennae for new Americanisms," Harold said, "so I spoke with the guardians of the sacred flame of our language at the Oxford English dictionary." Turns out the world's top lexicographers "can't suppress American inventiveness." So instead of trying, "they've opened a special North American office to scour and sift" and the OED has accepted "such made-in-the-USA terms as teenager, superpower, yuppie, weight watcher and unisex." Harold breaks the news that "perp walk" and "vidiot" — "for a habitual user of video games" — will be added to the next edition.

At this point, Harold revealed an unforgettably traumatic experience in his life. "It took me nearly ten years to work out the American purport of the word quite," he said. "I brooded long when I was told that an article I had written was 'quite good.' To me, it meant that it wasn't really good enough, only approximately good, lacking in something or other." Feel Harold's pain and leave "the poor" to dwell on this quip: "The most subtle are the misunderstandings we never realize are misunderstandings."

As usual, Harold concluded with an inspired commentary on the American spirit. "America has always been in search of superlatives to express its boundless optimism whatever the facts may suggest," he said. "As to achieving the end of poverty, one day the Americans really will succeed — and then you can be sure they will mint a word quite terrific for the occasion."

P.S. Harold told his British audience that American broadcast newscasters "like to refer to 'precipitation situations' when they mean it is raining" and prefer the term "adverse weather conditions" to "bad weather." Maybe that's why "the poor" didn't grasp the force of the approaching storm. Kidding. Seriously, what elitist network is Harold possibly watching? Sam Champion doesn't talk like that.