... blog post:
"Superlatives are too frequently abused. We will content ourselves by saying that the Contax II represents the most advanced miniature camera design and construction of the present day." - 1936 Zeiss Catalog. So what, apart from the camera tech, has changed since then?
Well, the abuse of superlatives has become so bad over the intervening years that nothing is ordinary any more and everything is awesome or rad or amazeballs or on fleek and we have all had to become stoked or super excited about even the everyday stuff in life or indeed we are all bossing it rather than being simply in control of something.
So when something really outstandingly good and exciting turns up we want to highlight, we need some new super superlatives with a sincere ring to them that regain the high ground and don't sound like they have just emerged from some facile US chat show.
This is a real problem. Anything at all badass we invent has the danger of going viral and simply becoming yet another abused and denigrated useless superlative.
So maybe we could take the word enthused for example, shorten it into 'thused' and there we have a slang expression for excited. I'm thused about this, really thused. In fact I'm super thused. If we could get some influencer or celeb to 'promote it' and it caught on, in a short time it would become more meaningless noise in general use along with all the other garbage.
So a suggestion, let's reintroduce the archaic terms that have established meanings like spiffing, ripping, topping, top-hole, wizard, capital, corking etc. Then we can say things like, "That camera is in corking condition" and everyone would know exactly what we meant.
Mind you it wouldn't make you super hip or super cool would it? Still, I'm really thused about it, it's a wizard idea.