Bhatia began noticing super more when she moved to Silicon Valley about a year ago. Yet it’s not just the mellow or upbeat who resort to it. Adverbs are, in general, considered weak parts of speech, at least per Strunk and White’s controversial dictum, “Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs.” (Certainly, it’s extremely difficult to vigilantly avoid adverbs always.) Calling someone “supersmart,” for example, is a poor, wordy substitute for “brilliant.” Super is also an unnecessary or lazy addition to a sentence. His naïve misreading of her character jibes with his choice of modifier (“really nice” wouldn’t have been nearly as good), pegging him as a happy-go-lucky simpleton.
![another word for unnecessary language another word for unnecessary language](https://d1avenlh0i1xmr.cloudfront.net/2cc05c00-9a91-4138-8e47-07d0f6b7de87/9-1.jpg)
Chris Klein’s amiably dimwitted jock refers to Reese Witherspoon’s cutthroat Tracy Flick as “supernice” multiple times.
#Another word for unnecessary language movie
One of my first cultural memories of a sardonic adverbial take on super comes from the 1999 movie “Election” (“Fargo” used it memorably as an adjective, too). O’Conner calls its “annoyingly chirpy” tone. What is it about the word that is so grating (to, again, cantankerous ears), other than its omnipresence? For starters, its surfer-dude register combined with what Ms. Bush’s desire for “a kinder and gentler” nation seems to have panned out nicely.) (For comparison’s sake, very nice and quite nice have much more level climbs, though they still outpace their super sibling in total usage. To track one case, super nice barely registers on a Google Books Ngram search until 1969, spiking upward after 1984 and soaring even higher since 1997. In a 2015 essay for the digital magazine OZY advocating the word’s abolition, the writer Pooja Bhatia cited statistics from the Corpus of Contemporary English indicating that super followed by an adjective - in other words, in adverbial form - was more than five times as common from 2010 to ’12 as from 1990 to ’94, with the biggest leaps coming in the last decade. O’Conner, an author of several books on language, with “my super-dainty Kate” in “The Taming of the Shrew.” But it has been in use as a stand-alone adverb - as a synonym for very or extremely - since only 1946, according to Merriam-Webster.ĭata confirms the meteoric ascent of super. Shakespeare even got into the compound mix, noted Patricia T. “Super” (from the same word in Latin, meaning above, over or beyond) has been around as an adjective and noun since the mid-19th century and as a prefix long before that. A specific adverb has become superpopular in the last few decades, its spoken and written use rising at such a superfast clip that, if you’re inclined to verbal curmudgeonliness, it can be superirritating.