Saturday, December 04, 2010

The word "epic" is one of the most misused and overused filler words in the English language. Here are examples of its misuse on Facebook and Twitter:



If you have used the word out of context, which means any time since 2008, you should stop whatever it is you're doing and start plowing fields, because you lack the ability to form language that doesn't involve mimicking others, and are therefore a cow.

The word epic should only be used to describe two or three things, ever. In fact, here's a comprehensive list of all things epic:

* Oceans.

Oceans are "massive and imposing in scale or size;" literally epic.

* Lengthy narratives.

Literary epics are tales of heroism, and are often about voyages across other epic things, such as OCEANS. I don't know every literary epic out there, but I know that getting "FRONT LAWN SEATS" sure as shit isn't:

* The cosmos.

That's it. Unless it's an ocean, cosmic or heroic, it's not epic.

So when you dipshits ascribe the word "epic" to banal things like the new Tron poster (not even the entire movie, just the poster), and children's games like "duck duck goose," you cheapen the word and water it down so it just becomes a sound you make, like a grunt when you approve of something.

And it's not just used for approval, it's also used to describe minor disappointments, like having to restart a DVD because it skipped. Now every minor inconvenience is an "EPIC FAIL."

And if it's cool, it's not just cool but an "EPIC WIN." And for the record, fail is a verb, and is something you do, like fail at English. The act of failing is "failure," and is a noun. People can be failures, but they can't be "fails." That doesn't make sense. So when you miserable pieces of shit say "epic fail," what you really mean is "epic failure."

Which makes you an "epic fail".

Oops, I meant "failure".

Using words like "epic" to describe how extremely impressed you are by everything has ruined the word. If everything is epic, nothing is epic.

It's a big trendy inside joke with a recognizable template that everyone can exploit in a vain attempt to be funny and fit in. I get the supposed humor of being an ironic idiot, but people who use the phrase aren't being ironic anymore, just idiots. Phrases like "epic [BLANK] is epic" have largely supplanted popular phrases from TV and movies, and now we're inundated with stupid shit like this:




And just an aside: hashtags are pointless, hashtag jokes are stupid and people who use them are giant assholes. The problem with Twitter hashtags, other than the fact that metadata doesn't belong in your content, is that people who use Twitter insist on linking that shit on Facebook, Google Buzz, MySpace and every other website and widget they can possibly link to their stupid accounts. You know what, shitheads? If I wanted to follow you on Twitter, I'd sign up for an account. There's a reason people choose one social network over another, and the rest of the world shouldn't have to spend time figuring out the proprietary syntax of your stupid network. If people wanted to receive your Twitter updates on Facebook, they wouldn't be using Facebook. People who link their accounts rarely deign to sign into both social networks to reply to or check comments, but they're happy to share all their #unintelligible @twitter #nonsense #with @everyone #in #the #universe.

Man, reading that one phrase made my eyes water.

The whole point of hashtags (or tagging in general) is that it allows people to easily categorize certain posts, and like categories, you should only use them when you're searching for something, not to make some stupid joke about how obscure your "topic" is.