Trask Avenue

You know what’s happened, don’t you? We snatched the exclusive world of superlatives, recklessly threw it into the combustible core of the web, and watched it blow apart in a way that would have made Robert Oppenheimer proud.

As willing participants in this weird alternate universe called the Blogosphere you can’t help but notice the epidemic of exceptional praise for unexceptional performance. (To be fair it extends far beyond our little bloggy neighborhoods.) This misuse of language reaches its nasty tentacles everywhere, much like a cockroach intrusion. You only need to see one to know thousands of similar vermin scurry about unseen. The notion of using appropriate praise at the appropriate time has blasted right past the exceedingly pervasive into the exceedingly perverse. This cultural phenomenon strode into town, staked a claim on Main Street and proceeded to smack common sense upside the head, sending it sprawling like an old man whose cane was violently snatched away. It is everywhere. If you participate at all in the glut which oozes from every corner of the web, either as a contributor or an observer, you can’t escape it.

And it’s so easy to perpetuate, isn’t it? Our obsession to be part of the conversation, quite often with sincere intentions, has cheapened the language. If a person does something mildly clever they are lavished with a flurry of effusive absolutes that would make Alexander Fleming blush. He never got the kind of praise you regularly see on the web. And he invented penicillin. Although I suppose thinking about penicillin isn’t as freaking awesome as watching some skateboard dude execute an Aileron roll.

Read the comments wherever you surf the net. Without fail you will see words like “brilliant”, “genius”, “amazing”, “unbelievable”, and “astounding” tossed about like a baseball at Yankee Stadium. A guy in Ohio smashes an egg on his buddy’s head at a party then posts the video on YouTube. Amazing! Another guy regurgitates advice on his blog which was given to the first child by the first parent. Remarkable!  A woman makes a few pithy observations about stuff learned in 8^th grade. Brilliant! Hey, I think double-checking your résumé for spelling errors before sending it out is a fine idea too. But instead of defaulting to an adjective used to describe the works of Mozart, shouldn’t we pause just for a second and consider using something more appropriate? Because when we use superlatives to describe everything they eventually end up meaning nothing.