Unique! Unparalleled! Extraordinary! Miraculous! (broadcast media hype) (Column)

• Author: Saltzman, Joe

The broadcast media and the public have run out of superlatives. They have so trivialized ordinary events by proclaiming them extraordinary that, when something really extraordinary happens, there's no way to describe it. All of the justifiable adjectives have been taken.

"Unique," for example, doesn't have any impact because media hucksters have misused it to describe frequent and unassuming events and people. Hype and pandering have attempted to turn average activities into one-of-a-kind occurrences.

So, broadcasters turn to "very unique" or "most unique" or, in the words of one local newscaster, "uniquest." For those too lazy to use a dictionary - and that seems to include practically everyone on the air - "unique" still means the one and only, something or someone having no like or equal, unparalleled, unequaled, incomparable, matchless, inimitable, nonpareil, unsurpassed, without equal, and so on. To add a "very," "most," or |est" to create an even more superlative quality for a word already in that category shows the desperation of the media and their listeners in search of new ways to describe daily events.

A word such as "unique" used to be reserved for events and people who were one of a kind: Superman coming to Earth, Babe Ruth hitting his 60th home run, Charles Lindbergh flying solo across the Atlantic, humans on the moon, etc. But today, when every Tom, Dick, and Harry or Demi, Sharon, and Madonna becomes a "unique" event, there is no easy way to comment on the extraordinary. What happens when something unique does occur or when someone accomplishes that once-in-a-lifetime achievement?

There's always "miraculous." On television news, people do not survive accidents or gunplay anymore - they miraculously survive them. Underdogs no longer upset favorites - they miraculously defeat them. Basketball players no longer make shots at the buzzer and baseball players no longer leap over fences to make catches - they miraculously accomplish these feats.

A word such as "miracle" used to be reserved for events or actions that appear to contradict known scientific laws. They usually are attributed to supernatural causes or, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, to an act of God. The more commonly used "miraculously" used to refer to an event in which God somehow must have been involved. Occasionally, some newswriter would refer to a miracle when a child trapped in a hole in the ground was rescued after two weeks or when a survivor walked away...