27-02-2025
‘I literally died laughing' – are you guilty of everyday hyperbole?
'The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts,' wrote George Orwell in his seminal 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. We're certainly guilty of thinking foolishly about bread, if the language used by chefs is anything to go by. This week, the lexicographer Susie Dent took restaurants to task for their use of ' flowery embellishment ' on their menus, taking particular objection to a description of what is essentially a slice of toast as 'artisanal organic signature sourdough, toasted to a golden hue and suffused with salt-encrusted butter'. She's not alone: two friends of mine compete to see how many times they can spot the phrase 'pan-fried salmon' on a menu.
But it's not just chefs, or their marketing advisers who have elevated the everyday to the extraordinary, as Meghan Markle might put it. Hyperbole is now a part of everyday discourse to such a degree it has, ironically, become the norm. Modern capitalism, social media and the reality-distorting nature of political discourse in the era of Trump and Musk have conspired to produce a hyperinflated form of language whereby context and meaning within everyday conversation and notably on social media have become untethered to an arguably absurd degree. 'Since the days of Blairite spin doctors, public figures have imitated marketing in pressing a relentlessly, breathlessly positive message,' agrees Tony Thorne, director of the Slang and New Language Archive at King's College London. 'But this has become even more relentless as online influencers vie to get clicks, likes, kudos and clout.'
In other words, language is being weaponised to stake ever more preposterous claims. So which words are the worst offenders?
Literally
The word literally stems from the Latin root litteralis, which means to take words in their natural or customary meaning, without any ulterior spiritual or symbolic meaning. Not that this bothered the former footballer, turned Sky Sports pundit Jamie Redknapp, who took literally's secondary function as a means of adding emphasis to mind boggling proportions during the noughties with his literally nonsensical descriptions of the action. My favourite example being: 'he had to cut back inside onto his left, because he literally hasn't got a right foot'. It's similarly used all the time by Gen Zedders to sensationalise online their mundane personal experience, a la 'OMG I'm literally dying'. In the new world order, however, literally is being used less in the service of figurative fancy than to create a new truth. ' It's literally the best cabinet the country has ever had,' Musk said yesterday on Trump's new top team, which includes, er, him.
Stunning
Stunning has long departed from its Middle English root meaning to render unconscious. Its present-day ubiquity as an adjective for something extraordinary is a particular pet hate of Thorne, who partly blames the ad men. 'Back in the 1950s and 1960s, stuffy, repressed Brits used to wonder at or mock American advertising and marketing language –'super', 'terrific' 'grrrreat' etc,' he says. 'Some professions were more guilty than others – estate agents, for instance, who have been overusing 'stunning' for many years. But anyone who can 'curate an online identity' can now promote themselves, so the need to 'stun' is even greater and the gushing has become a torrential tide. Even casual conversations are full of 'once-in-a-lifetimes', and 'world-beatings'. Such hyperbole is also unimaginative and frequently untrue. Not every ice cream is 'sublime' and they are never 'insanely good'.'
Tragic
The word tragic, or tragedy, jumped from the theatre – whereby it historically means a man or woman brought down by hubris – into national conversations during the 19th century, as people reached for 'epic' words to describe the impact of tumultuous events such as the death of Abraham Lincoln. These days, it's used routinely to describe an event in which a person loses their life. But it's also often used in everyday conversation, particularly on social media, to describe with flippant, sometimes self-deprecating irony events that are anything but. To be clear: the death of a child or a devastating flood is tragic. Wearing an ill-judged outfit on a night out is not. Also in this category is the word 'trauma' which I frequently hear people use without irony in general conversation to describe commonplace experiences, and 'triggering', which has become confused with 'made me think of'.
Iconic
My absolute favourite hated word. The pernicious reach of branding into everyday discourse has a lot to answer for, but the widespread overuse of the word iconic is surely the most self-defeating. An adjective that used to be the preserve of religious sculptures is now applied by marketing enthusiasts and people on Instagram to everything from sausage rolls to sunsets in order to ascribe singular worth to something that is either widespread or unexceptional. In a world that has also long lost its sense of the sacred, perhaps the overuse of the word iconic is the last gasp of a civilisation trying desperately to find value amid the essential meaninglessness of existence. To this, we can add a couple more pet dislikes of mine, such as 'blessed' and 'reach out', both of which are pseudo-spiritual hyperbolic replacements for 'fortunate' and 'get in touch'.
🤣 (Rolling on floor laughing emoji)
Hyperbole is the de-facto language of online messaging, whereby users have not only given up on nuance, but they've also abandoned language itself for outsized symbolism. Hence the use of a 'rolling on the floor laughing' emoji routinely given in response to a wry comment, or a hands in the air emoticon to convey feeling mildly frazzled. Indeed, the need for a swift, unambiguous response to something – rather than a medium which allows more subtleties such as a letter – could well be one reason for the growth of everyday hyperbole. No one has the time to parse the nuance of 'wry' or 'mildly' anything. 'We are now in an 'attention economy', says the author Henry Hitchings whose books include The Language Wars: A History of Modern English. 'Exaggeration has been normalised.' As has unnecessary communication. I can no logner send an innocuous text to a friend without them endorsing it with a 'thumbs up'.
Transformational
A good person who devotes their life to helping others might once have been described as having a 'transformational' effect. Now, with routine life viewed in terms of experiences and journeys, it's one the most overused words in business and PR, heard and seen everywhere from board rooms to labels on bottles of wine. 'The problem with transformational change is that it implies ordinary change has no change in it whatsoever' once quipped the comedienne Sandi Toksvig. 'Transformational is the sort of dynamic, buzzy, aspirational word that self marketeers love,' adds Hitchings. As indeed does AI, which he argues is behind the proliferation of the word on professional networking sites such as LinkedIn. 'AI-generated content, when the user prompts the AI to strike a professional and dynamic note, tends to stray into the realm of grandiloquence.'
Unprecedented
Unprecedented, which is used to describe something that has never previously happened, has a logical paradox built into it since, as the old maxim goes, it's impossible to prove a negative. Still, its meaning is fairly clear, although that hasn't stopped commentators and ordinary people from describing world events as unprecedented on a fairly regular basis. Only last October Keir Starmer said that Britain faced 'unprecedented challenges', and earlier that year promised to fix ' unprecedented stagnation '; it was also word of the year in 2020. But perhaps it is not in the end hyperbolic to say that unprecedented is the word that truly best describes how it feels to be alive in these interesting times, rocked as they are by pandemics, climate change and rapidly shifting geo political plates. 'The problem is, reality is changing so that boosterism and hyperbole is no longer entirely exaggeration or falsification,' says Thorne. 'The language – and the reality – of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, to take just one example, really is unprecedented.'
