Your messaging says more about you than just the words you choose.

How many times last week did you hear, “This Cobb salad is amazing!”

Maybe it wasn’t a salad.

Maybe it was the price of oat milk, how the gym wasn’t very crowded, or how dry someone’s moisture-wicking socks kept their feet.

All amazing — not just good, nice or agreeable — AMAZING.

Suprise! Words should have meaning

Do you remember when “amazing” meant something?

Apparently, it once referred to something at the limit of human comprehension; something astonishing or wondrous.

Something that arrests the consciousness of a human being and causes them to mouth inaudibly, “I can’t believe I’m seeing this”.

Likely we all have experienced amazing at some point:
The unending ocean.
A new life taking its first breath.
The roar of a waterfall.

These moments are lightning in our brains, and their effect on us — the deafening thunder of mental clarity that follows — is what “amazing” is made of.

Stunning, dumbfounding experiences that cause our minds to hit its face against the seat in front of it as the brakes get slammed on our sense of self-importance.

A cobb salad can only do so much.

How social media has watered down our words

So how did this all get started? When did “amazing“ become a synonym for good?

It’s not a coincidence that so many experiences became “amazing” at the same time that social-media started making us hold up a mirror to our lives and think “I’m doing it wrong”.

To illustrate: think back to your first Instagram post.

You probably started with ordinary pictures with an unnecessary filter just for fun, not really knowing what you were doing.

But then you started following others who posted gourmet meals and vacations on white-sandy beaches.

Pretty soon you saw images like these every day until you’re no longer excited about posting that picture of your dog taking a nap.

These constant negative comparisons can make us try to drum up some of our own thunder by calling special attention to what’s really just our ordinary, everyday experiences; thus, “amazing” replaces “good” in order to simply receive attention.

But, there just isn’t a proper synonym for thunder… and that’s how it’s supposed to be!

We don’t need one, because we all know “amazing” is actually rare and special, no matter how overused it may become.

The tide is shifting

Really, can you imagine nothing but jarring, life-changing experiences?

That sounds exhausting.

Really, don’t we crave what’s common in our lives as predictable and dependable? Because it’s only when we have this baseline that what’s truly amazing means anything to us.

In fact, all of this sensationalistic selling of what’s actually ordinary is having the opposite affect: fatigue.

People are starting to choose ‘genuine’

More and more, phony hype and overly-dramatic language is being ignored, and for good reason.

English is a wonderful, descriptive language with words that fit the varying shades of life, experiences and anything else.

Thus, any trend or effort to change the actual meaning of words in people’s minds is short-lived at best. As a result, we’re ironically becoming bored with “amazing”, and are more impressed by “genuine”.

Knowing this is where we’re headed anyways, can we all go back to using a wide-variety of adjectives and give “amazing” some time to cool off so that it’s ready for when something actually is amazing?

We all know that Cobb salad can’t change a life. Which is actually a relief.