Something I’ve noticed over the past few years is a marked increase in gushing.
gushing
adjective
expressing a positive feeling, especially praise, in such a strong way that it does not sound sincere:
One of the more gushing newspapers described the occasion as "a fairy-tale wedding".
Yes that’s the one. Somebody behind me in the café this morning was gushing over another person’s dog as if the mutt had just invented a cure for cancer. Dogs attract a lot of gushing, children not so much.
Another recent café gusher was apparently thrown into ecstasies when meeting someone she obviously knew very well. This full-on gusher treated the other person as if they had just popped up after an absence of fifty years.
Gushing is something we tend to associate with the theatrical profession thanks to stereotype luvvy behaviour, but I’m sure it’s become more common since the pandemic. Some kind of over-active survival sentiment perhaps.
Oh you're still alive, oh how amazing of you...
8 comments:
Now I’m hoping, AKH, that you turned and politely said, “Absolutely delighted about the pug but can it be done without the gushing?” Or words to that effect.
A word my partner and I have noticed increasingly used is 'epic' seems to have also replaced 'awsome'.
James - I'd receive some baffled looks though.
Tammly - we hear 'epic' from the younger generation all the time. I don't know where it came from.
It's the counterpart of the catastrophising that is also pervasive. Everything has to be dreadful and the end of the world (literally, when it comes to the climate) or else completely marvellous.
Being ordinary is just being boring, and doesn't get you noticed.
Sam - yes it is the counterpart of the catastrophising. Somebody who gushes is almost bound to spout apocalypse when it comes to climate change.
I once ticked off a gushing student who said I was a Renaissance Man.
"Do you mean dilettante?" I began. Any least he wasn't completely Americanised: he didn't say I was truly a Renaissance Man.
PeWe should learn to luxuriate the long littleness of life. Humdrum is healthy; banausic is better; we should aspire to the prosaic and quest for the quotidian.
dearieme - that gushing student probably did mean dilettante, but not deliberately. I agree, humdrum is healthy but it isn't easy to retain a solid focus on it. The world is very distracting.
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