{"id":953,"date":"2014-06-22T11:27:35","date_gmt":"2014-06-22T10:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/?p=953"},"modified":"2014-06-19T11:30:23","modified_gmt":"2014-06-19T10:30:23","slug":"never-mind-the-hyperbolics-please-can-i-have-some-less","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/?p=953","title":{"rendered":"Never mind the hyperbolics. Please can I have some less?"},"content":{"rendered":"

When writers overuse hyperbole, it\u2019s not just the readers who suffer \u2013 it\u2019s the language<\/span><\/p>\n

The Guardian Mind Your Language Blog (19\/06\/2014)<\/p>\n

In the 1980s, it became fashionable for footballers to talk about \u201cgiving 100%\u201d on the pitch, or \u201cbeing 100% committed\u201d to their clubs. Before long, this was regularly upgraded to 110%. But even the impossible was soon deemed inadequate. By the 90s, players up and down the country were reportedly putting in 120%, 200% and 300% of their maximum possible effort. And in April, when the editorial director at London Live quit less than a month after the channel\u2019s launch, the chief executive announced that he had \u201cabsolutely, 100,000% confidence\u201d in the editorial team. Well, no one will ever be able to trump that level of confidence \u2026 unless they just say a bigger number.<\/p>\n

As a consequence, today, if anyone talks about giving a paltry 100%, they\u2019re considered a layabout or a flake.<\/p>\n

To stay with football for a moment, at the beginning of the 2008\/09 season, a pleasing metaphor emerged: \u201cpark the bus\u201d, meaning \u201cplay very defensively\u201d. But by 2010, Jose Mourinho was already talking about \u201cparking the plane\u201d, and in April, when Chelsea beat Liverpool 2-0 at Anfield, Liverpool manager Brendan Rogers accused his opponents of \u201cparking two buses\u201d in front of the goal. (For future reference, Brendan, most double-decker buses are about 10 metres long and 4.4 metres high, while the standard goal size is 7.33 metres by 2.44 metres. Chelsea\u2019s second bus was redundant.)<\/p>\n

OK, so it\u2019s nonsensical, but where\u2019s the harm? After all, we have an unlimited supply of numbers. Well, the problem of inflation is not restricted to numerical phrases, and we\u00a0don\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0have an unlimited supply of words.<\/p>\n

Take the word starve. In the early middle ages, if you said you were starving (steorfan<\/em>), you\u2019d be dying. The meaning narrowed over the ensuing centuries, so that by the high middle ages, you\u2019d be dying, but specifically of hunger (or cold). Then inflation stepped in again. No longer content with saying \u201cI\u2019m hungry\u201d, people began to use the hyperbolic expression \u201cI\u2019m starving [of hunger].\u201d This usage then became so widespread, and thus so drained of force, that today, if you really want to convey the idea that someone is about to expire from malnutrition, you have to use phrases like \u201cstarve to death\u201d or \u201cdie of hunger\u201d.<\/p>\n

Many other words have met similar fates. Compare the original and current meanings of desperate (bereft of hope), ages (hundreds of years), fantastic (imaginary), awful (commanding respect or fear), vandal (member of a warlike Germanic tribe), giant (mythical being of superhuman stature and strength), freezing (cold enough to render solid) and thing (meeting, matter brought before a court of law).<\/p>\n

One of the most recent casualties has been the word literally. Its earliest, Middle English meaning, confusingly, was literal \u2013 \u201cof, or relating to, [alphabetical] letters\u201d. In the 16th century, it took on a figurative sense: \u201cin a strict or actual sense\u201d (mirrored in the phrase \u201cto the letter\u201d). But within a couple of centuries, it had been be co-opted to mean \u201cvery, extremely\u201d, and that usage is now so common that even the OED now lists one definition as \u201cto indicate that some (freq. conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense\u201d. Literally has thus been demoted to the massed ranks of bland, faceless intensifiers, along with awfully, dreadfully, dead, really, terribly, completely, totally and utterly. Thus it now officially means literally …\u00a0and its opposite<\/i>. This leaves us with no unambiguous way of indicating that something is non-metaphorical.<\/p>\n

Many other words are on the verge of losing their juice. Where once we had stars, now we can\u2019t do without superstars and megastars. Thankfully, most sport writers have stopped talking about Man City \u201cmassacring\u201d Arsenal, but the fact that the word massacre is now routinely applied to\u00a0the killing of five people<\/a>\u00a0or fewer \u2013 where once it referred only to the killing of thousands \u2013 is testament to its declining value. And once you\u2019ve become hardened to hyperbolic uses of the word \u201cwar\u201d \u2013 war on want, war on drugs, war on terror \u2013 when a real conflict comes around, does \u201cwar\u201d really feel adequate to describe it any more?<\/p>\n

All of these words have been laid low by hyperbole: by speakers and writers, seeking to press home a point, applying a more forceful term than is strictly necessary to the matter at hand.<\/p>\n

The result is that it\u2019s becoming ever harder to express ourselves with any vigour at all. We have to use repetition, verbal stress (or, in print, italics or caps), or tack on ever more adverbs. There\u2019s the \u201cstarving to death\u201d mentioned above; if we want to relate our 15-minute wait for the bus, we\u2019re now likely to say \u201cI waited ages and ages\u201d; and if we want to signal that something is strictly true in every sense, we\u2019re almost forced to say \u201cquite literally\u201d, or \u201cliterally \u2013 and I mean literally\u201d.<\/p>\n

That all sounds slightly inconvenient, you say. But it would be somewhat hyperbolic to call it the end of the world. After all, these processes are perfectly natural and have been going on for, well, ages. Language will survive; it always has.<\/p>\n

Well, yes, and no. The processes above all took place over hundreds, if not thousands of years. My concern is that as technology gives a voice to all, through blogs, Twitter, news aggregators and the ever growing variety of TV channels, competition is increasing, the pressure to impress, and thus to exaggerate, is growing, and the weakening of meaning is accelerating.<\/p>\n

Look at the recent penchant for Buzzfeed\/Upworthy-style headlines: \u201cThis Is A Video EVERYONE Needs To See! For The First Time In My Life, I\u2019m Speechless!\u201d \u201cHysterical! You Won\u2019t Believe What Happens Next!\u201d Much more of this and the words \u201cincredible\u201d and \u201camazing\u201d, already drained of much of their vim, will soon be understood to mean \u201cmildly diverting\u201d or \u201canother minute of my life I\u2019ll never get back\u201d. Listen to ballerina Tamara Rojo on Desert Island Discs the other day, saying of Amy Winehouse: \u201cFor me, Amy changed the music industry\u00a0beyond recognition<\/em>\u00a0… After her, every female singer is kind of inspired by Amy.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a place for hyperbole. Used judiciously, it can help get a point across memorably (and used injudiciously, it can be hilarious \u2013 think of Monty Python\u2019s Four Yorkshiremen sketch). But when it\u2019s overdone, it can make the user appear hysterical, ridiculous, or even sarcastic: one of the reasons Enoch Powell\u2019s Rivers of Blood speech backfired was that he rather overegged the pudding. And when everyone\u2019s doing it, the language suffers.<\/p>\n

While hyperbole can be effective in, say, comment pieces and reviews, I would question whether it has any place at all in news reporting. A colleague wrote about this subject on this blog\u00a0a couple of years ago<\/a>, and he made some excellent points. But he clearly didn\u2019t make them hyperbolically enough, because the abuse is continuing, and, if anything, getting worse.<\/p>\n

Open the news pages today and you\u2019ll struggle to find a policy that isn\u2019t a flagship policy, a ruling that isn\u2019t a landmark ruling, a speech that isn\u2019t a landmark speech, a criticism that isn\u2019t damning, a negotiation that isn\u2019t frantic, a blow that isn\u2019t devastating, a large company that isn\u2019t a giant or a majority that isn\u2019t vast.<\/p>\n

A recent Comment is free article referred to Angelina Jolie\u2019s really rather unremarkable acceptance speech on receiving her best supporting actress Oscar for Girl, Interrupted as \u201cthe\u00a0world\u2019s most awkward<\/i>acceptance speech\u201d. An\u00a0article about Maria Miller<\/a>\u00a0casually threw in the line \u201cAfter five days of\u00a0public fury<\/i>\u00a0about Miller wrongly claiming mortgage expenses … \u201d<\/p>\n

Crisis \u2013 \u201ca period of intense difficulty or danger\u201d \u2013 seems a reasonable term to describe what\u2019s been happening in Ukraine, Syria or South Sudan. But is it really the appropriate term to describe a slight decline in popularity of\u00a0South Korea\u2019s national dish<\/a>?<\/p>\n

And in a recent story about the search for flight MH370 (redacted before publication), one paragraph began: \u201cIn a day packed with dramatic developments \u2026\u201d The developments in question were two: one, the search in a particular area of the Indian Ocean had turned up nothing; and two, an officer in the US navy suggested that the \u201cpings\u201d whose detection precipitated the search might have originated from a source other than the plane\u2019s black box. Well, fetch me a cold compress and a comfy chair.<\/p>\n

Hyperbole, as a technique of oratory, was praised by the likes of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian because it conveyed emotional truth. The exaggerations were so huge, so obviously absurd, that the hearer knew they weren\u2019t literally true \u2013 but nonetheless got the message that the speaker felt very strongly about his subject.<\/p>\n

News journalists aren\u2019t supposed to argue cases or convey feelings. They\u2019re supposed to tell us the facts. You could argue, therefore, that if a news journalist exaggerates, it\u2019s not hyperbole at all; it\u2019s deception.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more important than ever to convince the reader that your story is relevant and interesting. And yes, everyone else is turning it up to 11. But journalists, of all people, should not be conspiring in this mass extinction event. We should be acting as a brake on it.<\/p>\n

How can we do that and still make our voices heard over the screaming, hyperbolic hordes? Well, for a start, we could make sure that the\u00a0content<\/em>of our stories is accurate, interesting and original. And if we really must use rhetorical devices, we could always try some of the myriad others at our disposal. A case could conceivably be made, for example, for understatement. Litotes isn\u2019t completely without merit either. The power of paranomasia can amaze ya. Hyperbaton we don\u2019t see half enough of. A generous pinch of oxymoron never goes amiss. And anacoluthon \u2013 why not?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When writers overuse hyperbole, it\u2019s not just the readers who suffer \u2013 it\u2019s the language<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,13,57],"tags":[127,172],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesusromerotrillo.es\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}