While I'd love to think this is because, as a society, we have just got more positive and enthusiastic about life, realistically I think it is simply the result of feedback fatigue.
Thanks to social media's constant cry for comment and the mainstream media's anxious bid to make every breaking story rate higher than the last, hyperbole has become the norm. In short, exaggeration just isn't any more.
Or as Josh Billings put it, there are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can't tell the truth without lying.
We're all guilty of it.
Ask yourself this: how often in the past few weeks have you described something as "awesome"?
While I'm highly critical of its use, lately I have used the word to describe everything from my son's (quite ordinary) ability to sleep until 8am on Sunday, the weekend's (not unusual for spring) 22-degree day and the chicken sandwich I had for lunch.
"Stunning" is used in a similar way. I (very fortunately, it has to be said) see the word all the time in feedback on my photography Facebook page.
But whilst my photos are pretty cool and the brides all beautiful and happy, I do sometimes wonder if the viewer really was sitting in front of their iPad stunned into some sort of stupor as the word in its true understanding would seem to suggest. And if I see one more quite ordinary event or a food photo described as "epic", I am going to run screaming into the street in a way that will almost certainly result in involuntary commitment.
"Epic" describes Homer's Odyssey and the industrial revolution, not a well-executed trick on a skateboard.
The Virgin Mary and the symbol of the cross are iconic. Kim Kardashian and the golden arches are not.
At the same time in history as we've become prone to embellish our language and descriptions (or perhaps because of it), another word has fallen victim to misuse.
The word "literal" is widely understood by everyone to mean something precisely and exactly as described. And yet how many times have you head it infiltrate a sentence when the words that should have been used were "virtually", "almost" or "seemed like"?
"The car sped past me at literally 300km an hour" probably means about half that speed actually.
When we exaggerate I don't think we're lying (or at least we're not meaning to). It's just that inflation has been mainstreamed. And as consumers of language and conversation, we've learned to assimilate a bit of dramatic embellishment into our comprehension.
After all, why let the truth get in the way of a good story? That would be truly horrific.
