DID you know there are approximately 1,025,109.8 words in the English language? I'm not quite sure what constitutes .8 of a word but, since 14.7 new ones are apparently invented daily, it is probably both impossible and insignificant to speculate. And, besides, that is not my point.
My point is, with such a plethora of words at our disposal, why is it a few of them are over-used and misused in ways that are frankly annoying.
I was about to write "frankly horrific" but that would have been hypocritical and instantly proved my point.
Genocide is "horrific". Using dramatic words to describe ordinary things is not.
In recent years, there seems to be a general linguistic trend to talk up something beyond what it really warrants.
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 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 they can't tell the truth without lying.
We're all guilty of it. Ask yourself: 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 a chicken sandwich.
"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, while my photos are pretty cool and the brides all beautiful and happy, I sometimes wonder whether the viewer was really sitting in front of their iPad stunned into some sort of stupor as the word, in its true sense, 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 embellishing our language and descriptions (or perhaps because of it), another word has fallen victim to misuse.
The word "literally" is widely understood to mean something precisely and exactly as described. And yet how many times have you heard 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 300 kilometres 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.