6 days after the tragedy in Tucson, humor helps.

Hang in there Gabby… we love you!

Hang in there. We are praying for you.

We hope that anyone considering a boycott of our lovely state in the wake of SB1070 will hear the news that the city of Tucson (homebase for BrinkMedia) is actually the first city to sue the state of Arizona over SB1070. The whole state is not some fox washed nut job right wing key hole, just some of it. And Tucson is 20 degrees cooler than Phoenix. So there.

Many years ago, even before the Internet, I noticed the word “amazing” showing up a bit too often in my own prose. Not only in my written prose, in the words that I spoke every day to my friends. That band was “amazing”, it was “so amazing” to see the pigeons in the park, amazing things were happening all the time.

Advertising at the time seemed to pick up on this as well. Tide brought “amazing” results that you had to see for yourself when you washed your clothes. Over time, the word faded from our vocabularies like a pair of over washed blue jeans. When was the last time something was really amazing?

Lately though, if you take just a small step back from the twenty somethings gathered at the organic snack dispenser, you’ll start to hear a cascade of awesomeness. Everything is “super awesome”, from the party everyone went to last night that you weren’t invited to, to the latest iPhone app making the rounds.

And in a bold fashion that I find particularly annoying, people are starting to refer to themselves, their actions and their cohorts as awesome, as in “We are so ****ing awesome, check us out”, or even , “I’m so awesome”. When you start hearing that more than once a day from the same group of people, talented, engaging people even, you begin to wonder if you are missing out on some secret code, some new way of conveying, well… awesomeness itself.

But is saying it being it? These millennials can say anything, even things that don’t make any sense.

The really troubling thing is that advertisers and PR peoples have now picked up on it, and trust me, “awesome” is the type of word they will bludgeon to death. I just received a newsletter (that I opted into from an agency that I once respected) that made my jaw drop! It thanked me for joining their “awesome” newsletter. And later on it basically said I should trust these people with my marketing because they had a “super awesome” team ready to go. Wow! I will, totally….