Le Mot Juste

I was reading this article and a passage leapt out at me:

Whatever else you might say about the New York Times, it takes itself very, very seriously. So nowhere has the whiplash been felt more sharply. Maureen Dowd was excited about the America that emerged on Election Night 2008. “I grew up here,” she wrote, “and it was the first time I’ve ever seen the city wholly, happily integrated, with a mood redolent of New York in the weeks after 9/11.” Now she worries that “there’s an untamed beast rampaging through American politics. But this beast does not seem blessed; rather it has loosed a kind of ugliness and wildness in the land.”

I rarely read the Weekly Standard and I just as rarely read Maureen Dowd, for similar reasons. But this woman has won a Pulitzer Prize?

The word “redolent” is derived, ultimately, from the Latin word redolere which means “to emit a scent” and emitting a scent remains the literal meaning of the word today. Of what was New York redolent in the weeks after 9/11? Hint: it wasn’t team spirit.