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Daniel Day-Lewis Saves Golden Globes from Amazingitis

Do they do it just to torture me? Don't the Golden Globe recipients see how I get the megrims when all they can say is "amazing" and "incredible" for everything they value? When they repeat the same few weary, stock superlatives used year after year---at these ceremonies and the Academy Awards as well?

       Haven't they heard my cry for meaningful terms of praise and acclaim, seen my book of 6,000 alternatives to "amazing" and its ilk?

       I guess not.  Because in acceptance speeches at the 2013 Golden Globes Awards ceremony (January 13), every outfit, agent, husband, director, crew member, mother and child was "amazing." Every experience was "incredible," except for a few things distinguished as something beyond special---these were "absolutely amazing."

       I write about expression and expressiveness, but I use "amazing" myself in casual speech, and I don't jump on friends who do the same. When there's little time to prepare or consider alternatives,a stock term hits the tongue and that's it.  Filler. Ineffective but inoffensive.

         But when intelligent and extravagantly paid actors with their well-paid publicity teams know they'll be needing words to describe excitement, achievement, surprise, gratitude, and admiration, wouldn't you expect better than the most flaccid, most exhausted terms? And if we didn't hear them say "amazing," we heard such surrenders as "I just don't have the words," "there are no words to describe ..." ?

       Well, there are words to describe worthy things!  Thousands of them, whether as single words, phrases, or figures of speech. One has only to care---to make a small effort in thought and preparation.  It took a caring Irish actor to underscore this fact at the Golden Globe Awards, just when, writhing in lexical pain, I'd despaired of anyone breaking the grip of the stock terms.

       And there he was, Daniel Day-Lewis, accepting best-actor award for his title role in "Lincoln." Soft-spoken and Lincolnesque himself, he first spun a tidy metaphor about a day's work equaling a scavenged mouse brought home in the jaws.  He then nobly shunned "amazing" and "incredible" as he praised his "gifted" colleagues and hailed "Lincoln" director Steven Spielberg as "a humble master with a quicksilver imagination."  Finally, to cap the ceremonies and save my evening, he addressed the film's writer:

       "Tony Kushner---every day, I have to live without the immeasurable wealth of your language; which reminds me every day of the impoverishment of my own."

            Maybe it wasn't quite Cicero or Shakespeare, but in the night's maze of amazings, it showed the way out.