I made a mistake last week. I erroneously eavesdropped on a teenage conversation. Not only did I suddenly feel far older than I actually am, but I felt inclined to lay the linguistic smack down on these pimple people.
Slang exists in every generation. Phrases such as “the bomb” and “bling” are my generation’s contributions to the English vernacular. I’ll admit the terms aren’t that stellar and certainly lack the creativity of idioms such as “all that and a bag of chips” popularized in the previous decade. But at least my generation’s additions didn’t dilute strong words.
Being under 30, I don’t want to sound like the grizzled old man waiving his cane in disgust of “these kids and their rock and roll muzak.” Of all the four-letter words that have lost their might over the past few years, none saddens me more than the overuse of the word epic.
People, the word epic, by definition, refers to a long, poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero, in which a series of great achievements are completed. Your buddy eating three hot dogs in one sitting isn’t epic, unless he slaughtered the Yeti with a harpoon he stole from Poseidon and roasted the meat over a pit at the center of the earth. Then his feast is epic.
I realize kids these days (ugh, I should be watching Matlock using terms like that) probably first heard the term Homeric epic and assumed it referred to Homer Simpson eating doughnuts at the nuclear power plant. If that’s the frame of reference, it’s logical that these kids probably thought anything that gently veered away from the mundane was epic.
But they are wrong.
Read the Odessey and you’ll see just how bad ass the word epic really was. He stabs a cyclops in the eye with a burning log. If you don’t feel like reading, watch the 300 or Lord of the Rings or, better yet, watch the movie Troy, based on an actual epic.
My plea to save the word epic comes from the destruction of another strong word made meek by erosion of overuse – awesome. Ask anyone my age or younger what the term awesome means and they’ll say it means something that’s pretty cool. That’s tragic. And yes, I’m being ironic by using the word tragic to describe how we’ve bastardized the meaning of awesome.
In its glory days, the word awesome meant something wondrous, literally filling you with awe. Your new sunglasses aren’t awesome. What’s awesome is the fact that your sunglasses protect you from a burning star, one million times the size of Earth, that generates more energy in one second than man has in its entire existence.
For the sake of our language, I urge you to please refrain from saying the word epic to describe things. If you know of anyone who overuses the term, stop them before they jeopardize the purity of this four-letter powerhouse of a word.