Lucky Dip

Useful Information No 4: Incredibly incredible

Nowadays, everyone and everything is incredible. That incredible restaurant we went to. Taylor Swift’s incredible Eras tour. Those incredible volunteers. The incredible pain he suffered. Her incredible makeover. Harry Kane’s incredible goal. My incredible partner.

There are many more words to choose to describe superlative manifestations. ‘Superlative’ is one of them. What about:

astounding, unbelievable, phenomenal, amazing, stupendous, spiffing, marvellous, fabulous, stonking, prodigious, awesome, fantastic, wonderful…?

But no – ‘incredible’or ‘incredibly’ is far too often the qualifier of choice. And why is that? Because the choice of ‘incredible’ seems to confer on its user some kind of special merit, some gift of discernment that empowers the user to recognize incredible phenomena and reveal their worth to mortals from a lesser audience or readership. Moreover, so keen are users to display their power that they will load their delivery with a magazine of ‘incredibles’ and fire them at you in a hail of verbal bullets, like the output of a machine-gun. You may be confident that, in any radio or TV interview in which you hear ‘incredible’ once, you will hear it again within thirty seconds – and again, and again.

Why should a word be thus debased? Why should communicators take pleasure in debasing themselves thus? It’s…

...incredible.