"Great". Really?

“Great”

I think that English needs some more words, or perhaps we just need to learn the ones that already exist…

Take for example, “great”. Now, “great” is not a great word. It is overused and underappreciated (much like “awesome” was during the TMNT days… Cowabunga!), so that we really have lost any appreciation of how great “great” really is.

Words that indicate degree are often problematic, and “great” is no exception. Just how great is “great”? “Great” is “just swell”? “Fabulous”? “Amazing”? “Fantastic”? If you found $5 in your desk drawer, is that great? To me, meh, I mean, $5 is nice, but it’s not great. I’m sure I’ll spend it poorly, anyway. But $100 in my desk drawer? That’s one great accounting error in my favor.

Sometimes, we use “great” to mean vast, or huge, or any of those other size words… But this morning on the radio as I commuted into work, I heard someone refer to the September 11 attacks as “the greatest tragedy in American history”.

Now, whether or not this is true aside, I took some offense to this statement. Can we possibly use the fairly mundane word “great” to describe the horrors of that day? Is there no better way to describe it? I think “great” is both too vast and too limited in scope to rightly describe such an event. Can one word even describe it? Just something to contemplate when you are discussing the “where-were-you-when-you-heard”s that will surely be water-cooler fodder for the day.

I like to think of it in this way: It was a day and a time when they eyes of the world focused singularly in a united shock and, together, wept.

So, today, please do take a quiet moment to reflect on how life has changed, for better or worse, since that day. And when you do, please try to avoid using the word "great".