Adjective Inflation

When I say, "Life is good" - something I say at least once a day, if only to remind myself - I want you to understand, I mean that my life is excellent. It's as "good" as the Creation.

I've been thinking about this the last few nights. I saw a poster for "The Good Wife" and it got me thinking about one of those arcane bits of knowledge I happen to possess, retained from high school: Goodwife was once basically the way of saying Mrs. (Thank you, XJ Kennedy Reader and Nathaniel Hawthorne.) The vernacular was "Goody" or "Goodie" - spelling wasn't so particular back in ye olde days. It was the kind of surface courtesy endemic to the early days of the Colonies, when communities were small and frequently beset with challenges. Unity, kindness, courtesy, fellowship: all were less virtues than they were survival mechanisms.

Now, follow me, 'cause I'm going back and then I'm going to come forward; we'll see if I've made my point. The New King James Version of the Bible, the one from which my childhood church services and bible studies flowed, was commissioned in 1604 and completed in 1611. I always wondered, as a child, why God would look upon his first creations and proclaim them "good." I mean, He's God, right - if they're just good, shouldn't he go back to the drawing board and shoot for great? Or was it that God, possessor of the ultimate power and the ultimate perspective, had no need of superlatives, so it didn't need to be any more than "good" for Him in order to be "wondrous" and "awesome" to us? (I'll be coming back to "awesome.")

You be the judge: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness."

As I now understand it, this is as close to a literal Aramaic-to-English translation you're going to get, unless you're intimately familiar with ancient Hebraic sentence structure - which, despite my high school demographics and the studies of many close friends past and present, I am not.

So, each of God's creations, as set down in this ancient and sacred text - which, divinely inspired or not, was carted around by the wandering tribes and paid homage to and held as sacrosanct for many (well-counted) generations and held them to common spiritual purpose in the face of many (well-counted) trials and tribulations - were good. How 'bout them apples?

(Sorry, sorry, the urge to pun overtakes me sometimes. I'd blame the comedic sins of my father, but that sort of meta-humor is uncouth and digressive.) (He said, digressing.) (How many meta-s is that?)

Well, here's my point: what "good" was in the days of the Old Testament, what "good" was in Early Colonial times, and what "good" is now seem to me to be three fairly evenly-spaced points on a scale depicting one thing: adjective inflation.

Here's another example ripped from my early religious indoctrination: Awesome. The etymology of this word brings it to us from the Greek for pain; the word angst has the same root. A certain orange-masked Ninja Turtle might be seriously surprised to learn that his word for moments of pleasure has such an origin, or that Webster defines awe as "an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime." (Not that Mikey wouldn't still apply the term to a New York Style pepperoni pie.)

Or, how about excellent? A term that has seen slightly less abuse than "awesome" and far less than "good," excellent has - in my estimation - only devalued from "first-class, eminently good" to "good". Only devalued, in other words, from top-of-the-line to middle-of-the-road; as opposed to good, which has dropped so mightily in its use that in most cases, to speak the word is actually to imply "less than good".

(These observations only apply to American English; I can only evaluate what I can see and hear on a regular basis.)

Here's the sort of dynamic I think causes this phenomenon: while Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted "Theodore" Logan used the word in its originally intended sense, those of us who were exposed to their first-class, eminently good adventure at young ages - especially, I'm sure, those of you who didn't grow up close enough to San Dimas to know that not everyone talks that way - adopted the word into our daily speech. As the adolescent vernacular subsumed the word excellent, its overuse devalued its original superlative purpose; most excellent, a term that should be unnecessarily redundant (heh), takes over the superlative spot.

The devaluing of once-superlative adjectives creates a vacuum at the top that must be filled by ever-increasingly grandiose, bombastic terminology. In my childhood, the use of the phrase "long bomb" to describe a forward pass in football was restricted to passing plays that were just short of Hail Mary status*; now, it's used to describe any pass longer than ten yards, under any situation. So, into the vacuum steps "aerial assault," then "ballistic launch" - I'm fairly certain that "weapon of mass destruction" has actually been used, at this point.

And the very nature of human communication requires us all to follow the trend; otherwise, we run the risk of being misunderstood. Well, given the scarcity of understanding in the world today, perhaps I should say we run an even greater risk of being much much more easily misunderstood. I see this much the same way I see the stock market - a near-tangible manifestation of the collective consciousness, that both rises and falls according to our whim and directs without room for negotiation our responses to its whims. Just another item on the list of Paradoxes of Human Nature.

Fortunately, there is another phenomenon I notice, that tends to prevent the fairly horrifying implications of this trend (unabated, we'd need whole lungfuls of air to describe quotidian experiences): complete swaps in vernacular. You've seen this trend too, if you're of my generation or one more recent, and have watched West Side Story or The Outsiders or Stand by Me - the slang just changes, enough so that we're not forced to find increasingly grandiose ways of saying "boss". I think of it as something akin to the sudden genetic mutation that speeds up speciation in the Darwinian process; after years and years of using the same terms to describe the same things, some seminal cultural shift happens (I've already named two in our time, if you've been paying attention) and a term is born into common speech, or dropped forever. (Example of the latter: for whatever reason, today's kids have no visible response to "Who You Gonna Call?" or "Knowing Is Half the Battle")

We have a word for it, now, a word that describes its own existence: meme. Linguistic memes that don't fade are the pressure-release valve that keeps us from having to say "Man, that was absolute zero!" or "Dude, that was frosty like the icy tundra of the Antarctic!"

Perhaps that's both a bad and a good example, as no slang word in a hundred years has had the longevity and versatility of "cool." We really might need to say those things someday, in order to convey some of the same meanings we do now.

I fear that the age of constant interconnectedness heralded by Twitter and Facebook Mobile - crimes of which I am guilty - may accelerate this phenomenon. Today's tweens, as they grow into 20-somethings - for which there'll be some new cutesy term - won't know what the hell their younger siblings are talking about. But that's another blog for another time.

This phenomenon has been explored in books like "Ender's Shadow," in which the kids' short-hand speech to one another devolves until "neh" and "eh" take the place of complete phrases; and Nora Roberts's Eve Dallas series of books, set in the 2060s and in which the main character's sidekick uses phrases like "mag," "iced," and "frosty".**

I don't really think anything can be - or should be - done about these phenomena; it's just something weird about human behavior I've been thinking about. And if you've managed to get this far, you're thinking about it too. Mission Accomplished.

Admittedly, this has all been mad conjecture, wild speculation; but, as always, I calls 'em like I sees 'em - and the title of this blog is not a rhetorical question. I would love if someone would post a comment taking my observations apart. What Do You Think? Am I on to something, or am I getting, by proxy of your computer screen, a "WTF are you talking about, Four-Eyes" look right now?

*for those of you not in the know, a Hail Mary play: when the team in possession of the ball is in a desperate situation, the field is flooded with eligible pass receivers and the quarterback "throws up the ball and prays".

**For those who would slight my taste in 'literature' due to my familiarity with the oeuvre of Nora Roberts, I have this to say: I'll be damned if I try to read A Widow for One Year on morphine, but I tend to need distractions from the plight of hospitalization at times in my life. Nora's been there for me, courtesy of my mother, and - hey, at least I stopped watching General Hospital.