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“Claiming that I am a drag Queen or ‘performed’ as a drag Queen is categorically false,” tweeted Congressman George Santos. “I will not be distracted nor fazed by this.” “Wow, George Santos did something interesting!” responded Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. “All his other lies are super-boring, like, ‘I worked at a bank.’”
After yet another tennis match that went on into the early hours, Andy Murray’s brother Jamie said, “I’m sure you guys had to stay up super late.”
Leicester is one of two “super-diverse” cities in the UK, wrote someone in the Guardian, while the Sun encouraged readers to “fill in the super quick and straightforward three-step form.”
Super is on everyone’s lips, and it’s annoying. Yet it is nothing new. Someone in Seattle wrote in 2010 about a burger with a “super-artificial smoke flavor,” but superartificial has been in use since 1613. In 1610, John Donne mocked “super divine law, which is Decretals of Popes.” Superfast had been in use for a century before it applied to broadband.
In Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596), his fourth pamphlet against Gabriel Harvey, Thomas Nashe mentioned “Rome, or her super-delicate bastard daughter, ceremonious dissembling Italy.” Harvey himself was no slouch in super-coinage, writing in a letter: “O my soverayne goodman, howe can your owne soverayne joye… but shape a benigne answer to so benigne and superbenigne a replye?”
Four centuries ago, they were already aware that super was being overdone. In Thomas Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hoxton (1638), there are two women called Luce. The Wise Woman, taking Luce 2 for a boy, proposes that for a jape she should marry a gentleman who mistakes her for the other Luce. “Oh, super, super-excellent!” exclaims Luce 2. I don’t think super helps much when used as a synonym for very. Most uses of very are already unnecessary. Very interesting is no more interesting than interesting and super-interesting is less.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2023 World edition.
