Recently, a shadowy Howard Hughes-y media mogul issued a decree from Chicago's Tribune Tower that over a hundred words and phrases would be stricken from the vocabulary of Tribune's WGN radio station.

We have officially withdrawn all our applications for employment with Tribune, because as our reporting in this piece clearly demonstrates -- in italics, even! -- we simply can't string together a sentence without many of these apparently dirty words.

Sources say yesterday it all started sometime after 5 am in the morning -- it's alleged that authorities down in the WGN Tribune Tower, in a surprise move, completely abolished the use of numerous words and phrases. As of now, the death toll is 119 and it's definitely possible more could be added.

The perpetrator, famed news CEO Randy Michaels, acting as a bit of a diva, seeks to have news read in a more "down to earth manner" and wants to flee from the traditional "news speak" for undisclosed reasons. As expected, it's being criticized at this point in time rather than being lauded, seeing as it comes across as more of a censorship auto accident than anything else.

Going forward, employees have allegedly been asked to report their coworkers' transgressions in the wake of this decision, in order to lend a helping hand to the cause. So now the manhunt is on, in the mother of all free speech crackdowns, and many commonly heard terms are under siege, about to experience their untimely death, at least in broadcast terms.

Those of you who watch the news regularly are likely reeling from the senseless murder of so many innocuous phrases, but the fact of the matter is that Michaels is the boss and if he wants his broadcasts marred by language changes and to be mocked in the aftermath of that decision, that's up to him.

We'll be right back after these commercial messages...