Is Linguistic Inflation Insanely Awesome?
15th June 2022
Linguistic inflation is analogous to economic inflation, but it concerns a devaluation in meaning rather than price.
Inflation lies behind the popular use of such words as genius, epic, awesome, totally, and incredible. What they mean is often more modest than their traditional senses suggest: genius means clever, epic is impressive, incredible is surprising. Such is our need to imbue our words with force and significance, that we use hyperbole to entice people to pay attention – and the hyperbolic terms gradually normalise.
Say we’re sharing a link on the internet. Can we trust people to heed us if we say it’s “pretty good” or “rather interesting”? These intensifiers, which Orin examined last week, will seem mild in the midst of phrases like “insanely amazing” (which Google tells me has been applied to hair extensions and cheese dip recipes). So more people begin inflating their own lexical choices. Eventually the exaggerated forms become mundane.
The problem is the intersection of rampant narcissism and what might be called an evolving ‘attention society’. Status and remuneration flow toward those whose strident cries of ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ are most successful, therefore all the incentives are aligned toward ‘turning it up to eleven’.