For the past month or two I've felt that I over use the word fantastic. It's gotten to the point that the word has lost all meaning to me...like cool or sustainable. The worst part is that I can no longer use the term for its true meaning (ie. unbelievable or within the realm of fantasty) because people don't get that I've switched meanings and it results in a good deal of explanatino to get my point across. Unfortunately, you can't very well downgrade from fantastic. You can't just switch back to your monotonous life before fantastic and walk around saying things like "That movie was good. The character development was really nice." It just doesn't work. Doesn't have the same umph.
The thing is that I only seem to notice the overuse when it's too late. I'll be at my fourth fantastic of the conversation and something will click. It's as if my brain stem, as well as controlling my subconcious processes, has evolved to take on the additonal (get it?) task of tallying my fantastics. Once it has reached its fantastic capacity it causes all speech to stop and the rest of my brain begins the intimidating task of thinking of a replacement word. However, riffling through the lexicon of my mind takes a bit of time and, generally, I've already made it to fa- by the time we need to look for another word... Another word equivalent to fantastic and starting with fa...
Fabulous! Now there's nothing wrong with fabulous. It's a good word. I like it, but when you start to replace your overuse of fantastic with an overuse and kind of forced sounding fabulous, it doesn't always come across the way you would like. For example, describing a movie like Greece 2 as fabulous has a vastly different meaning to describing it as fantastic.
And thus lies my dilema: which is better, being the irritating girl that overuses fantastic or being strangely homophobic?
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
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Be the irritating girl who's strangely homophobic.
ReplyDeletePlus, 'fantastic' get nowhere near as much airtime in Canada as 'awesome/amazing'. Canadian people are easily amazed and/or awed, apparently.
ReplyDeleteOn an unrelated note:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-7QSMyz5rg
Damn, I got all excited when I saw there were three posts, but then they were all from you. Comment tease!
ReplyDeleteThat's true about awesome, I originally switched from awesome to fantastic although I still say awesome a fair amount. With so many potential synonyms for good, you'd think we could be more original, but apparently not...
That's the song I named my username after :-)