There are a couple of words I'm getting tired of hearing/reading. 'Literal' was something I wrote about before, but the latest gatling gun barrage is 'genius' and 'brilliant'.
It's not 'genius' to do something derivative or that someone else could've done. 'Clever' is a better word. This is clever:
It is not genius. Genius (in my mind) is doing something that's beyond current human knowledge and thought. Mastery of a technique can present genius. 'Brilliant' is in the similar vein. Posting a clever video on YouTube is NOT brilliant. Solving a problem in a unique way is brilliant. Solving a problem in a particularly simple way is also brilliant. 'Clever' and 'ingenious' are much more appropriate.
Maybe it's just me, but having journalists and bloggers evaluate something as 'genius' and 'brilliant' does nothing for me. If anything, I find it does the opposite. By and large, today's journalists and bloggers are not experts, nor are they even well-read or well-versed in a topic. They see something shiny and declare it 'genius' and 'brilliant' without explaining their own thoughts. It may be obvious if you examine what they find. It usually isn't, though at best it might be 'entertaining'. What do you think 'genius' and 'brilliant' mean?
By the way, most people exclaim that Albert Einstein and his Theory of Relativity were 'genius', though at the time, fewer than a handful of people actually understood the theory. It certainly is genius, though very few of the journalists of that time knew it, either. Maybe it's just the internet messing with Zipf's Law and annoying the hell out of me for it.
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