Cluster Specialist
Business Management and Administration
I first began noticing our society’s abuse of superlatives from an old “Seinfeld” monologue:
“People love to recommend their doctor to you. I don't know what they get out of it, but they really push them on you.A superlative is the form of an adjective or adverb that, in general, means something of the highest quality or degree; surpassing or being superior to all others; or, excessive or exaggerated.
"Is he good?"
"He's the best. This guy's the best." There can't be this many "bests." Someone's graduating at the bottom of the classes. Where are these doctors? Is someone somewhere saying to their friend, "You should see my doctor, he's the worst. He's the absolute worst there is. Whatever you've got, it'll be worse after you see him. The man's an absolute butcher."
And whenever a friend refers a doctor they say, "Make sure that you tell him that you know me." Why? What's the difference? He's a doctor.
"Oh, you know Bob? Oh, okay, I'll give you the real medicine. Everybody else I'm giving Tic Tacs."
One of the most accurate barometers for pop culture society can be our television. Go ahead and watch some rerun episodes of “Friends” and count the superlatives. It carried on nicely through its comedy cousin, “How I Met Your Mother”, but superlatives gained speed in that, by the time HIMYM writers opened their superlative vault, they found two superlatives in abundance to use because everything was the BEST EVER.
Then, we move on to the distant, Chicago cousin of “Friends,” the short-lived comedy “Happy Endings” in which the writers took it upon themselves to create their own superlatives, like “crazyballs” or “amazeballs” as in, “I just tasted the MOST AmazeBALLS cheesecake”. And, when something like superlative abuse is prevalent on television, we know it runs rampantly through the culture like a cute Daddy-daughter twerking video on Facebook.
There are many reasons why teachers can, and should, move students away from the often unconscious misuse of superlatives. First, using superlatives too much renders them pointless. If every movie is the best movie ever, then by that same logic, no movie is the best movie ever. When we overuse these terms of praise, they have less and less meaning and this translates into our thinking. The bar is continually reset lower and lower when we can no longer decipher what our standards for measuring quality are.
Secondly, superlatives have become the lazy brain’s thesaurus. Who among us has tried to describe something, and when our brains couldn’t find a suitable adjective, we used “Really” or “the most” or, the ultimate cop out, the phrase, “SOOOO so much”. Years ago, we believed texting short-speak to be harmless until it invaded classroom essays and test answers. Do we now find it acceptable for students to spell “please” with a “plz” – an ingenious way of not only shortening a five-letter word, but misspelling it in the process? No. But, when we are asked to describe something, and we supply a “great”, then follow up with a “totally!” then we have to wonder why haven’t we been punched in the faces?
Finally, we want our CTE students to have vibrant portfolios, to fill out eye-catching and interesting job and college applications and we want them to have rich vocabularies that put them above the competition in interviews. We do not want our students to answer a question about their first work experience as a teenager with, “Oh, my first job was the best job ever! And, my boss, I loved her. She was absolutely the most amazing boss anyone could hope to have. Really.”
The Johnson O’Connor Research Center offers us four basic steps to build a better vocabulary. (After all, we cannot try to remove one habit if we don’t replace it with a more positive one.)
- Be aware of words. Post them more around your room. Make students highlight new words in articles. Create lists. Review a new word once a week. Give bonus points for the use of new words. Be especially conscious of bringing in new adjectives and adverbs, the words that superlatives most often are replacing.
- Read. Use the NPR app, for example, and find articles worthy of a group read in the classroom. Assign more reading.
- Use a dictionary for the class that you select and of which you approve. Let your students see you using the dictionary in class during a lecture. Don’t be afraid to show them that you can always learn a new word, too.
- Study and review. Keep a classroom list of adjectives and adverbs that you all want to use. Let your students name it…maybe something silly and tongue in cheek. “Business Management’s “Cray-Cray-Amazeballs” Vocabulary List”.
You can, if you’re feeling very industrious, also find many quick and free exercises online about how to incorporate comparatives and superlatives. But, that is creeping over into English, and not CTE.
Having to do that, well, that would the biggest and most completely ridiculously awful ordeal that any teacher has ever had to do in the whole history of teachers around the entire world. Ever. For real.
References
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/superlative
http://www.jocrf.org/resources/EffectiveWays.html
Spot on! For realsies!
ReplyDelete