Excerpt of the Day: "Better Than Great" by Arthur Plotnik

Sadly, in this "age of awesome," our words and phrases of acclaim are exhausted. Even so, we find ourselves defaulting to such habitual choices as good, great, and terrific, or substitute the weary synonyms that tumble out of a thesaurus - superb, marvelous, outstanding, and the like. The piling on of intensifers such as the now-silly "super," only makes matters worse and negative modifiers render our common parlance nearly tragic.

Until now.

Better Than Great is the essential guide for describing the extraordinary—the must-have reference for anyone wishing to rise above tired superlatives. Arthur Plotnik, the wunderkind of word-wonks is, without mincing, proffering a well knit wellspring of worthy and wondrous words to rescue our worn-down usage. Plotnik is both hella AND hecka up to the task of rescuing the English language and offers readers the chance to never be at a loss for words!

Take a look:

Great

-Extremely Good

-Prized

-In Excellent Shape

-Distinguished

-Of Worldly Perfection

-Rich in Virtues

-Smart

A Tough Word to Beat

Toward the end of the 20th century, the venerable word great reigned as the default term for describing specialty. Used at all levels of speech, the term never seemed to exhaust itself, even within a sentence. Major events called for pile-ups, something like, “This great float honors one of the great gentlemen of the great State of California, and tomorrow two great teams will play what’s expected to be a great game before the greatest fans in this great nation.”

Today, if the word doesn’t quite put listeners to sleep, neither does it wake them to the wonders of anything. Approaching some two billion appearances in a Web search, it certainly has lost whatever specialty it had. If two billion things are special, what’s left to be ordinary? In conventional uses, great generates about one nanowatt of energy. Lately the word amazing has become slightly more energetic than great, but it, too, is accumulating usage numbers that suggest serious loss of clout.

The problem is that great, considered by itself, is still a great word, understandably employed for more than a thousand years for a range of uses detailed across two pages of The Oxford English Dictionary. Force comes from its very sound, starting with a growl (gr), which can be drawn out, followed by its long-a attention-getter, and concluding with an emphatic dental mute, the t. Quick and punchy, it serves as both adjective and noun (“one of the greats”) and shifts easily to the adverb greatly.

The word’s early meanings of “thick” and “coarse” suggest its relation to Old English grytta (coarse-ground meal). Even if its grit has been chewed to mush in overuse, it can still be freshened by novel intensifying devices. At least that is the rationale for including, among our alternatives to great, suggestions for intensifying this worthy old utterance: a blitzkrieg of greatness, fist-pumpingly great, great served hot, greatness in high relief, and thwackingly great, to name just five of dozens.

What will the next hot modifier be? Hard to say; such terms slide in and out of fashion, emerging from standard synonyms, street-slang favorites, and pop-star locutions. “You look mahvelous,” intoned comedian Billy Crystal, and suddenly everyone was intoning it. Even tha shiznit got its run after Snoop Doggy Dog rapped it, never mind its etymology. But the zing of any term fades after the first few thousand uses and even faster among youth subcultures. Campus superlatives such as bonus, core, key, or summit? So 20th century. The once-hot teen superlatives phat and fetch? So yesterday for teens (though still in play for the rest of us).

Fading or not, certain acclamatory terms—great, amazing, brilliant, terrific, and wonderful among them— continue to serve as what Stuart Berg Flexner described as “blurred words”:

“… used quickly and without much thought, almost as

automatic responses, because they are easily available….

The words are not always precise, which is one reason

we like them so much…. [We] avoid arguments and fine

distinctions we would rather not make.”

—Listening to America

But Flexner notes that while the words are imprecise, “we do want them to be forceful.” Unfortunately, wanting does not do the job. For serious word users, it is invention, experimentation, discovery, and open-mindedness that puts the grrr back in terms of acclaim.