HYPERBOLIA

We are facing an unprecedented crisis of epic proportions. We need to declare war on this menace, which is ravaging our language, and surge to the front lines to defeat it, and yes, I will say its name, and its name is HYPERBOLIA, an existential curse on humanity.

Hyperbolia is the intentional use of hyperboles.  For those of you who have lost your dictionary and are afraid to admit it, hyperbole means “exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally”.

Well, that’s not so bad, is it?  Who amongst us hasn’t said in a moment of frustration, “Oh, just shoot me” or express happiness by saying something like “I literally died and went to heaven.” or dealing with our kids,… “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times.”  No one really thinks or wants anyone to shoot them or believes that the speaker has died and went to heaven and lived to talk about it, or that we have said anything a million times.  Hyperbolia, on the other hand, is different.  It is the intentional misuse of language in our public debate, a propaganda technique in the hands of those who would bend us to their will.

In the 5th century B.C., there was a rabble-rousing Athenian, a politician named Hyperbolus, who often made exaggerated promises and claims that whipped people into a frenzy, but our etymologists (the guys who tell us where words come from) say that Hyperbolus' name did not play a role in the development of the modern English word “hyperbole”. They say that hyperbole comes to us from the Greek verb “hyperballein”, meaning "to exceed," not from the name of that Athenian hack. So, while holding on to that factoid to impress your friends with your accumulation of useless knowledge, I am starting to think that maybe old Hyperbolus, the politician whipping people into a frenzy, is more relevant to our modern discourse than we and grammarians may have thought.

Think of it.  Everything now is “unprecedented”.  It is unprecedented how many unprecedented things there are.  Everything is also a “War”.  It used to be that we had agreed that a “War” was a state of armed conflict between different nations or states or different groups within a nation or state, (see, The Oxford English Dictionary) and it was bad, and we had to do something about it (at least the wars we were in) whether we liked it or not.  Now we have the “War on Poverty”, the “War on Drugs”, the “War on Women”, the “War on COVID”; none of which we have won by the way. This led to related “War” vocabulary. There were “casualties.” There were “front lines”. There were “heroes” with only a few of us stopping to ask ourselves, “really?” 

We have also added “War’s” close cousin, “Crisis”, to our vernacular.  Everything is a “Crisis.”  See how I just did that…” everything is a crisis”….No it’s not, we still have ice cream and puppies, but hopefully, you see my point.  As the word crisis became overused, the Hyperbolians were required to move to “existential crisis” as in a crisis and I really, really mean it.

Those employing Hyperbolia, do not use hyperboles to exaggerate for a little word fun but are intended to scare the bejesus out of us in order to compel us to action, hopefully the action proposed by the Hyperbolian.  During the War on COVID, we were driven into enough of a frenzy that we actually voluntarily agreed to impose house arrest on ourselves (quarantine), destroy our businesses and livelihoods, cover our faces with cloth, close our educational institutions, and sterilize bags coming to our houses from food delivery services, all to keep from killing granny, because if she did die, we were told it would be our fault. Words were meant to scare us and drive us into a frenzy which they did.

We were so focused on not killing granny that we didn’t even think of the adverse effects of hiding in our homes for an extended period of time including depression, suicide, and other deaths that were caused because were too scared to seek medical treatment for ordinary bad things like cancer and heart attacks.  We were more afraid of getting COVID which we probably would have lived through quite nicely with only a few days inconvenience.

Global Warming is another area where the Hyperbolians now want to ban fire, i.e. CO2. When the initial round of global warming hyperbole that we were going to die in the heat was insufficient to scare us into appropriate action, the language changed. We went from global warming to “climate change” since there were these inconvenient cold snaps that were contrary to the global warming narrative, and that term covered just about everything. When “climate change” was insufficient to freak us out of our cars, we moved simply to  “Climate” to attempt to cover the whole realm of unpleasantness of life caused by heat, cold, hurricanes, drought, flooding, and the heart break of psoriasis.  Generally, if you are having a bad day, you can blame it on “climate” and demand action.

How do we fix this? Well, I’m not sure we can.  I think we must accept the fact that we will continue to be afflicted with Hyberbolia, the disease of language and debate. I sadly predict that there is no cure for this disease. We can only guard against its effects by refusing to being panicked. 

There will always be an unprecedented amount of people who will use and misuse Hyperbolia to get their way. I would just humbly suggest that the next time someone comes up to you screaming “We’re gonna die, we’re gonna die!!!, you quietly respond “Yep.”