When writers overuse hyperbole, it’s not just the readers who suffer – it’s the language
The Guardian Mind Your Language Blog (19/06/2014)
In the 1980s, it became fashionable for footballers to talk about “giving 100%” on the pitch, or “being 100% committed” 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’s launch, the chief executive announced that he had “absolutely, 100,000% confidence” in the editorial team. Well, no one will ever be able to trump that level of confidence … unless they just say a bigger number.
As a consequence, today, if anyone talks about giving a paltry 100%, they’re considered a layabout or a flake.
To stay with football for a moment, at the beginning of the 2008/09 season, a pleasing metaphor emerged: “park the bus”, meaning “play very defensively”. But by 2010, Jose Mourinho was already talking about “parking the plane”, and in April, when Chelsea beat Liverpool 2-0 at Anfield, Liverpool manager Brendan Rogers accused his opponents of “parking two buses” 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’s second bus was redundant.)
OK, so it’s nonsensical, but where’s the harm? After all, we have an unlimited supply of numbers. Well, the problem of inflation is not restricted to numerical phrases, and we don’t have an unlimited supply of words.
Take the word starve. In the early middle ages, if you said you were starving (steorfan), you’d be dying. The meaning narrowed over the ensuing centuries, so that by the high middle ages, you’d be dying, but specifically of hunger (or cold). Then inflation stepped in again. No longer content with saying “I’m hungry”, people began to use the hyperbolic expression “I’m starving [of hunger].” 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 “starve to death” or “die of hunger”.
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).
One of the most recent casualties has been the word literally. Its earliest, Middle English meaning, confusingly, was literal – “of, or relating to, [alphabetical] letters”. In the 16th century, it took on a figurative sense: “in a strict or actual sense” (mirrored in the phrase “to the letter”). But within a couple of centuries, it had been be co-opted to mean “very, extremely”, and that usage is now so common that even the OED now lists one definition as “to indicate that some (freq. conventional) metaphorical or hyperbolical expression is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense”. 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 … and its opposite. This leaves us with no unambiguous way of indicating that something is non-metaphorical.
Many other words are on the verge of losing their juice. Where once we had stars, now we can’t do without superstars and megastars. Thankfully, most sport writers have stopped talking about Man City “massacring” Arsenal, but the fact that the word massacre is now routinely applied to the killing of five people or fewer – where once it referred only to the killing of thousands – is testament to its declining value. And once you’ve become hardened to hyperbolic uses of the word “war” – war on want, war on drugs, war on terror – when a real conflict comes around, does “war” really feel adequate to describe it any more?
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.
The result is that it’s 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’s the “starving to death” mentioned above; if we want to relate our 15-minute wait for the bus, we’re now likely to say “I waited ages and ages”; and if we want to signal that something is strictly true in every sense, we’re almost forced to say “quite literally”, or “literally – and I mean literally”.
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.
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.
Look at the recent penchant for Buzzfeed/Upworthy-style headlines: “This Is A Video EVERYONE Needs To See! For The First Time In My Life, I’m Speechless!” “Hysterical! You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!” Much more of this and the words “incredible” and “amazing”, already drained of much of their vim, will soon be understood to mean “mildly diverting” or “another minute of my life I’ll never get back”. Listen to ballerina Tamara Rojo on Desert Island Discs the other day, saying of Amy Winehouse: “For me, Amy changed the music industry beyond recognition … After her, every female singer is kind of inspired by Amy.”
There’s a place for hyperbole. Used judiciously, it can help get a point across memorably (and used injudiciously, it can be hilarious – think of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch). But when it’s overdone, it can make the user appear hysterical, ridiculous, or even sarcastic: one of the reasons Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech backfired was that he rather overegged the pudding. And when everyone’s doing it, the language suffers.
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 a couple of years ago, and he made some excellent points. But he clearly didn’t make them hyperbolically enough, because the abuse is continuing, and, if anything, getting worse.
Open the news pages today and you’ll struggle to find a policy that isn’t a flagship policy, a ruling that isn’t a landmark ruling, a speech that isn’t a landmark speech, a criticism that isn’t damning, a negotiation that isn’t frantic, a blow that isn’t devastating, a large company that isn’t a giant or a majority that isn’t vast.
A recent Comment is free article referred to Angelina Jolie’s really rather unremarkable acceptance speech on receiving her best supporting actress Oscar for Girl, Interrupted as “the world’s most awkwardacceptance speech”. An article about Maria Miller casually threw in the line “After five days of public fury about Miller wrongly claiming mortgage expenses … ”
Crisis – “a period of intense difficulty or danger” – seems a reasonable term to describe what’s been happening in Ukraine, Syria or South Sudan. But is it really the appropriate term to describe a slight decline in popularity of South Korea’s national dish?
And in a recent story about the search for flight MH370 (redacted before publication), one paragraph began: “In a day packed with dramatic developments …” 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 “pings” whose detection precipitated the search might have originated from a source other than the plane’s black box. Well, fetch me a cold compress and a comfy chair.
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’t literally true – but nonetheless got the message that the speaker felt very strongly about his subject.
News journalists aren’t supposed to argue cases or convey feelings. They’re supposed to tell us the facts. You could argue, therefore, that if a news journalist exaggerates, it’s not hyperbole at all; it’s deception.
It’s 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.
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 contentof 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’t completely without merit either. The power of paranomasia can amaze ya. Hyperbaton we don’t see half enough of. A generous pinch of oxymoron never goes amiss. And anacoluthon – why not?
