Most people are great

Perhaps thanks to my interest in improving my writing and speaking abilities, I'm sometimes assumed to be a grammar, spelling and/or usage wonk, someone who goes around insufferably correcting split infinitives, whos for whoms and grocer's apostrophes. Turns out I can't stand those sub-Lynne Truss types, who I feel miss the forest for the trees; I do bear a major beef, however, with those who use words without regard to their meanings. This is actually more common as it sounds; some seem even to repudiate the notion of meaning in their speech, taking a degree of offense to the suggestion that words don't mean whatever the user wants them to. (Shades of Humpty Dumpty and his linguistic bribery.)

Many words, terms and phrases get debased this way, and I make an effort to excise from my speech whichever ones I realize are beyond help. The most obvious example is great. Were I to cast my vote for the least meaningful word in the English language, great would be the no-brainer choice. Maybe the situation's different in other Anglophone countries, but here in the States, great is pretty much a red-headed stepchild. The amount of abuse it endures, even at the hands of those otherwise mindful about communication, is astonishing when you listen for it. "That floral centerpiece is just great!" "Is still think that Transformers movie was pretty great." "If you could pass the guacamole, that would be great." Really? Out of all the qualities these things could possess, greatness is the one you identify? (This sort of thing isn't limited to one word, either; amazing is similarly thrown around by art wonks, though it's a bit more of a euphemism to describe a work without much articulable merit but which the describer nonetheless fears dismissing or even refraining from expressing an opinion on. An eccentric blue-haired slam poet who melts toy soldiers in a frying pan during his performance is already thin gruel, but if I hear a pack of nervous poseurs whip out amazing and apply it to him, I'll keep my distance and then some.)

I will also henceforth refrain from making statements about "most people." I've written before about wrongheaded invocation of supposedly "average people," but claims about "most people" actually seem to be much more common, more exaggerated, and thus more pernicious. In practice, I hear "most people" used to not to mean "the majority of humanity" but "a construction to whom I feel superior." The weird part is that I hardly ever see anyone call bullshit on this. Bold claims like "Most people just want Costco hot dogs," "Most people are depressed" or "Most people are sheep willingly led to their cultural and intellectual graves by the unholy alliance of the media and the military-industrial complex" do not receive empiricism's smackdowns — as they deserve — but solemn right-on-man-right-on nods. (And don't even get me started on the worst "most people" claims I personally hear, which tend to take the form "Colin, maybe you x, but most people not x," which, as I have demonstrated over and over again, furthers the morally and intellectually bankrupt dogma of Colin Exceptionalism.)