The hyperbole we love to hate
'Earth-shatteringly good' pizzas may not live up to their billing, but, linguistically, we'll never escape the cycle of exaggeration
'Pizza so powerful it can reduce our very planet to a heap of rubble.' Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
"Beyond unbelievable, will return" says a happy traveller of her holiday on a ratings website. "Utterly incredible" says another. These phrases don't seem all that strange, despite meaning, if you go by the dictionary definition, that the experiences were so extreme as to be difficult to reconcile with reality. One that may stick out for some of you, however, is the review of the pizzeria that describes it as "earth-shatteringly good". It was the reviewer's husband who used the phrase, and, she contends, "He isn't exaggerating – it is literally amazing".
Pizza so powerful it can reduce our very planet to a heap of rubble. Now that's some claim. What would possess someone to make it?
Hyperbole gets on people's nerves. This paper's Charlie Brooker notes with disapproval the praise-whirlwind set off by Kate Bush's return to the stage. His stablemate Ian Jack raises a sceptical eyebrow at the "passion" regularly expressed by politicians over this or that social good. Elsewhere, a commentator laments the frequency with which executives appear "thrilled" by some trivial corporate achievement. When I tweeted asking for words which people thought had "lost their force" through overuse, I was quickly furnished with examples including "iconic", "unique", "hero" and "sublime". It obviously drives people literally insane.
Jack blames marketing, Brooker the internet. They may be partly right. Assuming you want your opinion to stand out, the presence of billions of competing statements acts as an incentive to make it big and bold. And connectedness may accelerate the pace of semantic change. But I think Brooker is wrong when he says "generally, as a species, we used to avoid these kind of exaggerated emotional outpourings."
Hyperbole, you see, has always been with us, since it reflects a basic communicative bias. A core aim of most interactions is to be clearly understood. Exaggeration can serve to make the meaning of a sentence more salient, and therefore unmistakable. According to linguist Claudia Claridge, who has studied thousands of examples of hyperbole in literature, it also "highlights speaker attitudes and emotions with the intention of having these shared by the hearer", a tactic she calls "emotive persuasion".
The goals of salience and emotive persuasion clearly didn't arrive withTim Berners Lee or even Edward Bernays. But if we want more evidence that hyperbole isn't anything new, we need look no further than the many "conventionalised" hyperbolic expressions. These are the exaggerations that once grabbed attention, but we now don't bat an eyelid at. Some examples, courtesy of Claridge: an outdoor swimming pool on a spring day may be cold, but it's rarely freezing; a friend may have a tendency to moan, but he's not actually at it constantly; you might have plenty of them in your shopping bag, but unless you're a donkey you're probably not carrying loads of potatoes. You aren't, I hope, starving and no, you haven't been waiting for ages for your food.
Conventionalisation is the reason I like to think of hyperbole as a kind of linguistic perpetual motion machine. Once an expression fades into the background like these have, it'll need bolstering if you want to make your point salient, or engage in a little emotive persuasion. "Freezing" might not be enough any more. The water might be totally, super- or evenbeyond freezing. It might even be sub-zero or arctic. In a few years "arctic" might even be the conventionalised expression for "unpleasantly cold", despite being a huge exaggeration if you're within 60 degrees of the equator. Prepare for "totally super-arctic" as the cycle begins again.
There's a bizarre footnote to the story of hyperbole, which is that of its cousin, litotes, or understatement. Sometimes it can better serve a speaker's purpose to play things down. As a result – though the process is a little more mysterious than with hyperbole – change in meaning can occur. Lisa Purse and Lyle Campbell tell us, for example, that the French meurtre (murder, homicide) derives from a word meaning "to bruise". Bereaved once meant "robbed" and poison comes from a French word which meant simply "potion" or "draught". Likewise, killonce meant to strike, or hit – a hint that the taboo surrounding death or the need for secrecy might be responsible (think of gangsters euphemistically mentioning a "hit" they've just carried out).
None of which is necessarily going to help you use language to get your message across more clearly or persuasively. My non-linguistic advice? In this day and age, less is so totally more
