#“The End of Awesome”
What have the following words got in common?
- Awesome
- Amazing
- Incredible
- Huge
- Mind-blowing
- Gigantic
- Phenomenal
- Shocking
- Horrific
- Horrendous
- Staggering
So now that everything is amazeballs, nothing is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8I9pYCl9AQ
I watched Top Gear last night and Jeremy interviewed Kimi Raikkonen. One of the more boring interviews I’ve seen. Kimi gave one-word answers to many questions. Previously I would have said “The most mind-numbingly awful TVmomentever, a new nadir for the BBC”.
It reminded me of a business trip to Nokia in Finland in 2005 for EMC. I was sent a travel advisory ahead of time and it noted that Finnish people dislike small-talk. A problem for most Paddies. I arrived and struggled to keep my chatter to a minimum but then I found the local EMC people to be very chatty indeed. I realised that they had probably got a travel advisory on me which said that Irish people love small-talk :-)
I bring it up because I’ve realised that since we have hit a language dead-end, we will have to start heading in the opposite direction where language is stripped back and we possibly start taking the Finnish approach of “just enough”.
My part in this movement will be to awesomely kick-ass on superlatives. Sorry sorry, there I go again. I mean Iwill make an earnest attempt to tone it down.
What do you think? Will we just keep piling on the exaggerations where a normal cup of tea is mega-super-awesome-supercalifragilistic? Or will we revert to nice, good, decent, not-bad?