Confessions of an Academic Pseudo-Giraffe
Example 1. The following keeps happening at an increasing frequency when I spend time in an English-speaking environment. Someone asks me how I am, and I truthfully answer that I’m OK. This is met with a puzzled additional question “Just OK?” and a look of compassion conveying that the person thinks I must be going through a serious bout of depression.
Example 2. The Finnish national lottery draw, on TV every Saturday around 20.45. I am pretty sure that in the eighties the official monitors of the draw – men whose uniquely inflexible televised role has given them something of a cult following among the younger generations – still greeted the public with the simple “iltaa” (evening). Then it became “hyvää iltaa” (good evening), and some time during the nineties even that proved insufficient: “oikein hyvää iltaa” (very…) was introduced. I’m anticipating the day when one of them sheds the last constraints and moves on to “oikein vimmatun hyvää iltaa” (insanely…).
Example 3. I haven’t watched the BBC World News long enough to establish a convincing trend, but right now the standard expression for thanking the correspondents after their reports, or for taking over from another newscaster, seems to be “thank you very much indeed”.
Example 4. Thank you addresses at the Academy Awards.
Example 5. Increasingly, I hear always instead of often,
Something has to be done about this trend of hyperbole and pointless exaggeration, this inflation of language. It reminds me of the famous Spinal Tap scene where the guitarist explains why his speakers have a particularly high volume capacity. I think language is supposed to have a shared standard scale of relative stability as far as phrases denoting extent/intensity/amount are concerned. If you're already at ten when things are just OK, where can you go when you have the real thing that really deserves ten? I am not particularly interested in launching expressions that go to eleven.
