The Amazing Amazingness of Amazing Stuff

Creation of Man

Amazing.

Did it creep up on you as well?

This overuse of the word “amazing” just sort of … appeared.

Amazing.

Here I was just a moment ago trying to read about the Dodgers, and Don Mattingly wanting more instant replay — they’d lost recently to the Brewers on a questionable call to end the game — and up pops a Weight Watchers advertisement, with Jennifer Hudson allowing as how yeah she enjoyed the first iteration of WW she tried, but their new Points Program is … wait for it … amazing!

The word is effortlessly everywhere, with an emphasis on the word “effortless” because something that easy is surely not going to have any power or weight (no pun on the Points Programs intended) at all.

And lo and behold!

It doesn’t.

I swear to you that within the last week someone at a conference posted some social media saying, essentially, I’m at an amazing place with some amazing people, and I’m having a blast. Amazing. It was not significantly different. Fewer than 140 characters, and 21 of them were that word … times 3.

Amazing.

Here’s where I should be all lathered up about the decline of Western Civilization, but honestly, it’s not a big enough deal. Not amazing, if you will.

Because this too will run its course, and some new depredation will take its place.
Because the suppleness and subtlety of English means it can survive even this.
Because there are dozens of other violations of this sort every single day.

And maybe if we ignore it, the self-promotion tweets that start, “So pumped/jazzed/stoked to have my new blog/book/video out tomorrow. … ” — faux excitement as ways of mentioning something that you’re kinda sorta supposed to mention to “promote” events you’re involved in — will die die die die die.

Though no doubt many super amazing people were involved.

Doesn’t anyone just say thank you anymore?

It’s nothing short of

You know.

Recent

Coyotes and Christians

I am not saying Christians are like coyotes. [For that, some could cut caustically to coyotes are like Christians — tricksters, roaming in the dark, feeding on the dead … ] Simply noticed — somewhat in passing, as it’s said, having attained, apparently … achieved? … some kind of state where nearly anything I hear,

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And Did Dostoevsky Say ‘Beauty Will Save’

Short answer: he did not. Neither did Prince Myshkin, that we know of. Likely both believed it. Beauty — in the person of Christ — will do so. And clearly D wrote of M in The Idiot to explore art and beauty and ugliness and salvation. But did he say it, and did he believe that

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What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

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Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

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Random

Old Flannery Coat

The porch steps were slick with rain this morning, and I realized I knew people whose first reaction to someone slipping on them would not be sadness — let alone to help — but rather to laugh. These are the sociopaths-in-training. These are the men and women I pray get their asses kicked like Al

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The Fat Guy and Buffets

The word is buffet, and it is 300 years old, from the Old French, of “obscure origin” as the kids say, if the kids wrote etymological dictionaries. Obscure origin, but the word is more than making up for it three centuries later. They are everywhere. Everywhere the Fat Guy lives, and everywhere he has been. I

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Closer

Norm’s is the kind of restaurant where across the street there is a long car wash, a 12-unit apartment building, a donut shop open most of the hours Norm’s is open, a strip mall with a “Luxury Day Spa” between the cigarette store and the cut-rate auto insurance broker: “Free SR-22 Filings!” the sign says. It’s

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Functionally Illiterate Christian

Every few years I realize how wrong I’ve been. People who know me are faster on that, and even temporary acquaintances pick up the signals pretty quick, and I do the same for them. All this has happened before, and it will all happen again, the line goes. But this time it happened in …

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Related

Lapsed Pray-er

When I pray in the morning I often lapse into The Jesus Prayer. The link notes the Eastern Orthodox connection and its basic form — Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. — though it seems actually to come in different shapes and colors, some slightly longer and more formal,

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Saving Grace

Don’t ask me for grace. Not because I don’t want you to have it, for I certainly do. But I can’t give it to you. Only God can give you grace, of this I’m becoming certain. Grace is God’s action in our lives to accomplish what we could never do on our own. Dallas Willard which

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I See That Hand

We imagine Thomas even doubted himself. When the other disciples said Christ had risen, this earnest empiricist first said, “unless I see” … then he realized it wasn’t enough. So he demanded to “thrust my hands into His side.” For Thomas, seeing wasn’t believing. But touch … that he had hopes for. * Seeing isn’t

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Inglorious Bastards

This is a post borne of a recent article in Leadership Journal, by a guy who’s been meeting with Ted Haggard. I don’t usually write on stuff like that — it is cheeseball to even appear to piggyback for one’s own benefit on somebody else’s popular post, or to try and capitalize on an au

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