The word "phenomenal". I don't know why this word irritates me, but it does. Like nails on a chalkboard-type irritation. My sister used it during a recent conversation three times in the span of five minutes. There's a car commercial out now which uses it twice in 30 seconds. There's probably a hundred other instances over the past few months where I've heard this word used. Phenomenal. It has this subtle power to convey a supposed overwhelming awesomeness of something you experienced to another person, which I've noticed is it's most common usage. Apparently, there's a lot of amazing shit happening. Everything's freakin' phenomenal.
I feel like this word was sparsely used up until a couple of years ago. Then, for some reason, it started peppering more and more conversations. It's like the new hipster band of vocabulary words. Phenomenal has a $70 shag haircut and wears tight jeans. It listens to Animal Collective and The National and LCD Soundsystem on it's iPod Nano with white earbuds. It drinks PBRs with "Irony" and "Nostalgia" at the bar on Fridays, goes dancing and does bumps of coke with "Kitsch" on Saturdays.
To make a long blog post short, if you use the word "phenomenal" to describe something to me, and the event/situation/object is actually NOT phenomenal, but merely "outrageous", "hysterical", "totally sweet", or "awesome", I WILL slap you. Consider yourself warned...
3 comments:
that you reject "phenomenal" but encourage the far more overused "awesome" is, well, awesome
less than 48 hours to karaoke, my friend
what about the word "fierce"? that's becoming a pretty popular adjective too...
"awesome" is classic and timeless, and "fierce" isn't nearly as annoying...
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