Bricks and Boxes

My Awesome Vocabulary

I’m not doing much about it, but I’m well aware of the words I’m using too often. The most formidable challenges include: favorite, love, and awesome. Using them too often shows my laziness and the limits to my vocabulary.

For example, let’s look at a few highlights from Urban Dictionary’s entries for Awesome: [Hilarious!]

1. Awesome — formidable, amazing, heart-stirring, wonderful
Veronica Mars fans are awesome. They love the show so much they hired a plane to fly a message over Hollywood to show their support for renewal.

2. awesome — Something Americans use to describe everything.
Oh wow it’s just awesome.

6. awesome — A ’sticking plaster’ word used by Americans to cover over the huge gaps in their vocabulary. It is one the three words which make up most American sentances.
The American vocabulary consists of just three words: Omygod, awesome and shit.

7. awesome — The highest rank of a ‘cool’ saying to describe a person(s). Awesome is greater than cool, wikad, sick, super, kick-ass, and mega put together.
Duuuuuuuuuuude…. that Calvo chick is so Awesome :D

Let me just say it. Guilty.

But I think there’s a need for a word that ranks higher than cool, and it has to be accessible to everyone in many situations. That may not necessarily be a negative dumning down. This is not universal to language, but when the word at issue is used to generously share positive attitude, well, I’ll take it.

In the past few years I’ve made an effort to tell friends I love them. Perhaps a side effect has been to beat the word to death, but it’s made loving all people much easier. Likewise, excessively calling out things as “awesome” has made me better appreciate that so much can BE awesome. That’s awesome!

Image credit: MaximumFun.org

The New Sincerity

I was listening to Episode 82 of my favorite podcast, Jordan Jesse Go, when they mentioned “the New Sincerity demographic.” I’d never heard the phase before but felt that I knew exactly what it meant. I later dug up this February 2006 blog post by the host of the podcast, Jesse Thorn, on The Sound of Young America Blog, “A Manifesto for the New Sincerity.” (Go read it and subscribe to everything in the Maximum Fun universe.)

As I first interpreted the phase from the context of the podcast, The New Sincerity is a demographic (which can span multiple generations) of younger people who recognize the lame attitudes saturating popular culture.

I have problems with journalism and advertising and popular narratives repeatedly telling people that you choose one side and then must declare the other side to be total idiots. But that’s how they’ve learned to sell, by teaching us, and programming us, to operate with that attitude.

What I’ve been telling our Jennie is that we who recognize our differences are now also recognizing our shared investment in a better world. And it is important that when we disagree we take a care to value other people and not to drag the entire world down with narrow arguments and belittlement.

Less sarcasm. Less irony. More love and universal empathy.

I’ll let Jesse Thorn close these thoughts as he closed his New Sincerity manifesto.

Our greeting: a double thumbs-up.
Our credo: “Be More Awesome.”
Our lifestyle: “Maximum Fun.”

Throw caution to the wind, friend, and live The New Sincerity