Published: May 29, 2008 11:29 pm      

The verbal virus is spreading among us

If you are in the right, something may come along to vindicate you in the face of any scorn. You can say, “I told you so.” A brief item on our news wire has now vindicated me.

It has to do with our recent discussion of the American tendency to overuse certain words and phrases — things like “world class,” “cutting edge,” “state-of-the-art,” “professional grade,” “Oh, wow,” “fabulous” and “That’s good stuff.”

Even I am guilty of language abuse. My too-frequent imitation of Shrek describing a glob of earwax as “HUGE” was one of the reasons I got “tossed,” as a former girlfriend put it. Another thing that didn’t help was my habit of saying, “Hell of a waste of good land,” every time we drove past those prisons in Cresaptown. (Well, that’s exactly what they are — as I had to explain to the pastor on our way to my father’s interment ... adding that Dad had agreed with me.)

You may remember that my buddies asked why I grimaced and shuddered when a bubbly young waitress exclaimed “AWESOME!” after I ordered the breakfast buffet. I told them I had grown weary of “awesome.” Everything today is “awesome.” I hate to say the word, even when it’s appropriate.

Now, Billy Mays is on TV advertising a garden tool called the “Awesome Auger.” (As Emeril says, “Let’s keep it ‘G,’ folks.”) Say it fast enough and it sounds like a German beer: “I vill haf an Aussemager, bitte.”

What I didn’t tell you was that my friends said they were tired of hearing “actually.” One of them watches the Food Network on TV — as do I — and we agreed that “actually” may be more overused on Food TV than anywhere else.

“Awesome” and “actually” are like (horse residue) on a farm — all over the place. “Awesome” is corrupted even further when it’s amplified by “totally.” If something is “totally awesome,” does that mean it also can be “partially awesome”?

Like “awesome,” “actually” is a perfectly good word when used properly.

If you were to tell someone, “This bayonet was on a musket that one of my Confederate ancestors carried during the Civil War, and he actually used it to rip the guts out of one of your Yankee ancestors,” that would be totally acceptable.

However, when I hear a Food TV chef say, “Right now, I’m actually going to put the burgers on the grill,” I want to leap from my chair and cry out, “Really? You’re actually going to put the burgers on the grill? And you’re actually going to do it right now? Holy jumping (horse residue)! Never in my life would I actually have thought of that! It’s no wonder you’re actually the TV chef, and I’m not! AWESOME!”

I’ve developed patience as I’ve aged, but it has limits, and I come by that honestly. When the family got totally lost in New York City’s traffic, Great-grandfather Goldsworthy told my grandfather, “Boy, stop this car and let me out! You’re going to kill all of us!” Dad said that’s when the real fun began, and he was afraid the rest of them might actually have to take the train home.

If a movie was of a questionable nature, my grandfather would go see it by himself before allowing others in the family to watch it. I was told that he totally got up and walked out of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

Were a woman to drag me to that “Sex and the City” movie, which critics seem to think may be the most awesome chick flick ever, I might actually stand up halfway through it and holler, “If there are any other guys in here who need a drink as badly as I do, let’s go!” That would no doubt cost me another trip to The Landfill of Love, but I’d have plenty of company.

It may actually be a woman’s lot in life to be totally dismayed by the things her man says, and I’ve dismayed my share of them — but I come by that honestly, too. When I was a teen-ager, my mother confided in me that there were times my father used colorful expressions (which I refer to in our discussions as “Anglo-Saxonisms”) that he’d learned from his father. This was something I’d figured out by myself — and I was actually filing them away for my own future use — but it was totally her story, so I didn’t interrupt.

“I’ve gotten used to most of them, and they don’t bother me any more,” she said, “but every time he says (three-word Anglo-Saxonism), it hits me at the base of my spine and goes straight up my back.”

Fortunately for me — and for both of them, actually — she didn’t toss him because of that. They had a totally awesome relationship.

Recently, The Associated Press carried a small story that justifies what my friends and I believe about our abuse of the language. Here it is, in its entirety:

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NEWTON, Mass. (AP) — Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough has a suggestion for what young people can do for their country.

“Please, please do what you can to cure the verbal virus that seems increasingly rampant among your generation,” McCullough implored Boston College’s class of 2008 at commencement ceremonies Monday.

He said he’s particularly troubled by the “relentless, wearisome use of words” such as like, awesome and actually.

“Just imagine if in his inaugural address John F. Kennedy had said, ‘Ask not what your country can, you know, do for you, but what you can, like, do for your country actually,’ ” he said.

Graduates apparently thought his speech was, like, awesome. They gave him a standing ovation.

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That actually comes from a Pulitzer Prize winner.

I told you so.