A
review in the NYT says the main protagonist in the movie “Flight” is played by
a “titanic Denzel Washington.” This prompted the natural question: if Denzel
Washington is titanic, what was, say, Martin Luther King?
Supermegatitanic? The linguistic inflation epitomized by such bombastic
language has long been lamented by intellectuals. German writer and linguist
Uwe Poerksen has bemoaned the spread of “plastic
words” like “development” and “empowerment” which have lost any
substantive meaning and can be used to describe and justify almost anything. In
a similar fashion, writer Jennifer Egan has lampooned a fictional academic star
who studies “the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words
that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks” – like "friend," "real,"
"story," "change," “identity,” “search,” “cloud,” and countless others.
The
loss of meaning and emotional zing in such
overused words is usually attributed precisely to their excessive use. But what has made writers and
speakers to relentlessly ratchet up the
linguistic volume? Of course, it’s the partly the need
to break through the clutter, now exponentially increased by the way in which
the internet has opened up the floodgates for self-expression and endless
metacomentary. But I also have a sense that bombastic language has been made
necessary by the overall desensitization of the modern nervous system. In order to “light up” even weakly, it needs to be
bombarded with ever more bombastic language and other supernormal stimuli. And
this constant bombardment can only induce further emotional and existential
numbing. This is a classical feedback loop with, I am afraid, no exit hatch.
