Super!

By Lucy Ferriss. One of the many casualties of spell checkers is students’ ability to describe their family rituals. Too frequently, recently, they seem to be having super in the dinning room. And from their emails, I infer that the typographical slip comes from the superfluity of the word super, which pops up everywhere, mostly as an adverb: super happy, super hungry, super fantastic. I noticed it particularly when I learned of the passing of a friend’s mother from a mutual friend who wrote to say that he was super sad about it. I do not doubt for an instant the sincerity of my friend’s sympathy. But the oddity of the word choice, to my ears, may stem from an amalgam of at least three influences on our current super craze. More...