The Domestic
Sophie’s ultimate brownie
“What I dislike is someone using a heavyweight word for a lightweight sentiment”
Have you noticed that everything is AMAZING these days? Nothing’s just grand any more, it has to be FANTASTIC. How’s work? I’m FLAT OUT, they scream. How was Jane’s hen? HILARIOUS. Hilarious, really?
Are you trying to convince me that an event involving penis paraphernalia, warm Prosecco and a nine-hour pottery-painting session achieved a day-long period of sustained hilarity?
I just can’t get behind this chronic overstating of everything. Our words are losing all meaning. Malapropisms are one thing. I always get a buzz of enjoyment from a good get-wrong, but what I dislike is someone using a heavyweight word for a lightweight sentiment. Further to this, the abuse of the ALL CAPS has hit epidemic proportions.
As with everything these days, I blame social media. It all began there, and has slowly seeped out into our daily interactions IRL. There’s virtually no such thing as a low-key Instagram post; it’s all laboured, profound captions about fairly obvious messages (be yourself, everybody else is taken), selfies involving theatrical-levels of make-up for a Sunday brunch, and reams of all-caps comments bawling, “You look AMAZING!!!”
Our use of the word ‘amazing’, in particular, has gone completely bananas. ‘Amazing’ has become a form of greeting in and of itself. It’s a knee-jerk response that seems to kind of fall out of our mouths the second we’re presented with someone to hug and cuddle and kiss (the standard 2018 salutation, and not one I’m too happy about either).
After pronouncing the appearance of the person ‘amazing’ — despite their looking average, at best — I’ll move on, looking for something else to pronounce ‘amazing’. “This is amazing,” I crow on autopilot, mindlessly indicating a bag or a bracelet — or once, quite embarrassingly, a neck brace I’d mistaken for a scarf.
I realised ‘amazing’ was becoming a social crutch and one that I needed to wean myself off. The last time someone greeted me with “You look AMAZING”, I finally cracked. “I don’t,” I responded flatly. “I’m acceptable, I’m grand, I don’t look amazing and neither do you, so I’m not going to say it.” This didn’t go over well. I suppose I hadn’t supplied them with this whole mini-thesis on why I’m sick of overstating everything all the time. The person in question was, however, magnanimous enough to move on, and tell me that these brownies were amazing.
“They’re incredible,” she cried. “Well, they’re good,” I allowed. “No, they’re amazing,” she said. So, as you can see, I’ve bent the rules of my manifesto and have even gone so far as to dub them the ULTIMATE brownies — they are pretty good.