At Writing Boots in 2010, I wrote that "amazing" had replaced "awesome" as "the favorite linguistic foster child of insipid waterheads everywhere."
"You can't scroll through one Facebook screen," snarked I, "without reading about amazing husbands, amazing friends and amazing colleagues (at amazing companies)."
In the six intervening years, I'm still not amused by the perpetually amazed. But George Stephanopoulos amazed me last week by previewing a concert that was to be held in Central Park later that morning. "It's going to be amazing," he said.
A thing can't be amazing if you know it's going to be amazing in advance, any more than a thing can be surprising if you see it coming a mile away. Can it?
"Amazement is a product of confusion," or so it seemed to me six years ago. "Amazement happens when you had not the faintest idea! How is it that Americans are so constantly gobsmacked by the people they work with, eat with, sleep with every day? … You would have to worry about a population like that."
And worry I do. Honestly: Don't you?
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
Not defending status quo, nothing like that—even linguistic changes that make us a little uncomfortable.
I have a hard time spitting out “African American” in a barroom conversation because it is such a mouthful and still seems like asking for Splenda in my coffee … but I think it’s a long-term improvement over “colored” or even “black.”
But this tendency to apply amazings to many things does point to a lack of discernment at best and a lack of seriousness at worst.
So: Not for unchanging language. But: I want to know who the cribhouse whore is fucking, and at what price—and whether she has any better prospects.