Perhaps this is a baroque worry, but nowhere is it written that Santa gives out only plastic and metal objects for Christmas. There are, it can be said, many more meaningful things to request while sitting on the lap of a man wearing a red suit and fake beard. Thinking in such expansive ways can lead a person to myriad other types of desires, from good health to world peace. Meaningful gifts, then, can come in many forms, so perhaps wanting something to stop is acceptable. In a nutshell, we humbly ask: Dear Santa, Can we banish three words from the English language? Here is the rationale for such a request:
Experts who study such things claim there are just about one million words in the English language. Of course, many of these are no longer in use, but even if this number were to be cut in half, that’s still a very large list. This is a good thing since Ethnologue, an authoritative source on the languages of the world, reports that about 1.5 billion people speak English worldwide: 380 million of them are native English speakers; the rest just managed to figure it out somewhere along the way.
The burning question is, How many words do most English speakers know? According to Dr. Adam Crowley, an associate professor of English at Husson University, the answer is between 20,000 and 30,000. Someone like William F. Buckley might be on the high end of that list, but the rest of us mere mortals still have 20,000 or so on the tip of our tongues. That seems to be enough to avoid using the same words over and over. Why, then, are we subject to hearing the mindless repetition of a few words like “amazing,” “awesome,” and “unprecedented”?
If you think these haven’t been subject to massive overuse, here are some reasons that back up this assertion. During the 2024 Miss America pageant, the host and hostess used “awesome” more than a dozen times during their broadcast. During the first 45 minutes of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, we counted a mind-numbing number of “amazing's” before making a run for the television remote. And one would be hard-pressed to miss a mountain of “unprecedented” things that have been said and done as catalogued in the media this year. Google the word, and headlines abound: There are unprecedented floods, foods, cyberattacks, feats, and heat – all of which are most assuredly not unprecedented.
Strange, isn’t it, that all three of these words have something in common – they are superlatives. Something awesome, amazing, and unprecedented signifies something of the highest order. Why is it that English speakers feel such a need to talk about everything in an exaggerated way? As Liberty Nation’s expert editor, Connie Pollock, put it, “What really bothers me is saying something is the worst, or best, in history. It’s always the extreme, whether bad or good.”
An Unprecedented Christmas
Somehow, it seems fitting that Lake Superior State University (LSSU) is widely known as an expert in the linguistic world. Each year, it publishes a top ten list of “Banished Words.” LSSU’s director of marketing, Sheridan Worth, asserts that the annual list allows us to “reflect on the past year – our experiences, communication styles, and the phrases we commonly use.” The school received 2,000 nominations and came up with a final ten, but, alas, none of our banished words were on it. However, “hack,” “impact,” and “slay” were in its top five. These are not too shabby, though we quarrel that they made it to the obsessive level (obsessive appears as number eight on the list). Research revealed that “amazing” made the 2023 list, which must signify that people aren’t paying attention and carried on with it throughout 2024. Ugh.
So for Christmas this year let’s imagine a world without saying anything is “amazing,” “awesome,” or “unprecedented,” since most things really aren’t. It would be a welcome respite, and it would mean we can try out a few of the other 20,000 words in our vocabulary. One can almost hear the strains of Louie Armstrong’s gravelly voice singing What a Wonderful World, which is, as everyone knows, a far cry from an “awesome” world.
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