Has anyone else noticed a big upsurge of late in the number of people claiming to be “incredibly excited“? The latest example I’ve seen was the singer Hozier, who declared himself “incredibly excited” about performing at this week’s Grammy Awards. And all right, that’s a reasonable excuse for excitement. But it’s also an exception.
Certain classes of people – PR consultants are a high-risk group – are now wont to get “incredibly excited” at the launch of a new brand of odour-eating shoe inserts. Or if not excited, they’re “incredibly proud”, as Aer Lingus declared itself in a statement the other day after winning an award.
Note the implication in these statements that the level of emotion is very unusual for the person or persons in question. If somebody tells you he’s “incredibly proud” about something, he’s also hinting that humility is his normal state. If “incredibly excited”, he’s asking you to believe he’s not usually given to such giddy sentiment.
And yet for those of us who are naturally humble, and grounded, the apparent ubiquity these days of extreme pride and excitement can be a challenge. After all, if so many other people can work themselves into a fervour, the rest of us must be emotionally stunted.
The ability to find things “stunning” is another example of the phenomenon. You see the word a lot now, especially on social media, and most often applied to pictures of sunsets, or a harvest moon, or mountain scenery. And sometimes the views in question are indeed spectacular.
But if you believe Twitter, the incidence of people being stunned by pictures is now so high that the company should introduce concussion protocols. Henceforth if a user is stunned twice in the same week, there should be mandatory medical assessment. (“How many fingers am I holding up? Twelve? Sorry pal –no more Twitter pictures for you until after the next full moon.”)
Again though, the natural human tendency is that, underwhelmed by things other people find “stunning”, you fear it must be you, and wonder if you should ask the doctor about putting you on emotional Viagra, so that you can get your responses up to standard.
You need to remind yourselves at these times, as I do, that the people claiming to be stunned or incredibly excited may just be working in parts of the economy where verbal hyperinflation of sentiment has become the norm.
Witness, for example, what happened to the word “passionate” over the last decade. It used to be hard currency, reserved for the feelings of poets and lovers. Then it was co-opted into company boardrooms as the entry-level adjective for describing how enthusiastic you were about your job. Now it’s printed by the wheelbarrow load, like the interwar German mark, with similar value.
But there seems to be a particular urge for people to exaggerate when on social media. No doubt a lot of it this is about the need to grab attention, which you won’t do by flagging, say, “almost interesting pictures of tonight’s full moon”. Better risk disappointing the viewer (especially given the chance that he’ll think it’s him) than be invisible.
And then too, of course, with so many human interactions now taking place remotely, people are more free to exaggerate. Even on an old-fashioned person-to-person phone call, for example, you would have had to support a claim to be “incredibly excited” with suitable sound effects: a vocal tremor, heavy breathing, etc. If you weren’t really feeling it, this would be hard work.
It’s the same with the concept, so popular in the internet age, of things being “laugh out loud” funny. Yes, we’ve all seen solitary people laugh out loud while reading on a bus or train, or in a cafe.
But it’s a fairly unusual event. So much so that the person who does it will be embarrassed and try to suppress the laughter. Or if he doesn’t, and laughs freely, others will quickly feel the urge to move away from him, in case he’s an axe murderer.
Whereas when communicating by email, or text, removed from the risk of visual inspection, you can quite brazenly claim that something has made you LOL, or even ROFLMAO, while in reality sitting glum-faced on the No 13 bus.
Never mind that there isn’t room to roll on the floor, or that if it were physically possible to laugh your ass off, there’d be a lot of gyms out of business. You can even accompany your exaggeration with one of those little smiley faces. There’s one for every sentiment, and they don’t call them “emoti-cons” for nothing.
@FrankmcnallyIT