One of the many casualties of spell checkers is students’ ability to describe their family rituals. Too frequently, recently, they seem to be having super in the dinning room. And from their emails, I infer that the typographical slip comes from the superfluity of the word super, which pops up everywhere, mostly as an adverb: super happy, super hungry, super fantastic. I noticed it particularly when I learned of the passing of a friend’s mother from a mutual friend who wrote to say that he was super sad about it. I do not doubt for an instant the sincerity of my friend’s sympathy. But the oddity of the word choice, to my ears, may stem from an amalgam of at least three influences on our current super craze. I’ll list them in order of increasing historical depth:
- the once-popular use of the exclamation Super! to denote something fabulous;
- the ordinary-language acceptance, by now, of super as an adjective, particularly in proper names, to mark something as bigger and better than anything else—Superman, Super Bowl, Super-Ball;
- the rather more unsettling etymology of both the word super and its most famous designee, Superman.
All three of these background meanings shadow my appreciation of adverbial expressions involving super, especially when they emphasize (as they often do) the negativity of the condition: super sad, super cold, super sick, super hard, super weird. I’ll let others dwell on Nos. 1 and 2 while I concentrate on 3.
The OED defines super purely as a prefix, of course, and attributes to it chiefly properties of being higher, above, beyond, or on top of whatever is being prefixed. Whether that’s what Nietzsche meant when he coined the term Übermensch is a matter of much spilled ink despite George Bernard Shaw’s adoption of it for his play Man and Superman in 1903. Certainly, Nietzsche was not intending anything like the comic-book character my students now know in the form of the blue-eyed British film star Henry Cavill. Nor, in fact, was Superman’s original creator, Jerry Siegel, who first wrote a comic strip about the Super-Man, a Nazified Nietzschean Overman character who was a telepathic villain rather than an all-powerful defender of the American way. The demise of that character in the mid-20th century and the rise of the red-caped Superman who lives on in widescreen cinema coincides, on Google’s Ngram viewer, with a fall in use of the lowercased superman and a rise in the name that continues today.
Accompanying that rise is super’s ascendency as the adverb we know and love or loathe today, meaning “more of” rather than “beyond.”
Most of the OED’s examples are fairly esoteric, but when I think of them in ordinary discourse I feel the shift in meaning. For instance, superglacial, first used by Admiral William Parry to describe lakes existing on the top of a glacier, would surely be understood today as describing something very, very glacial. At one time in the past, it was possible for an ascetic to be described as supersexual; now, that term would carry a very different connotation.
We grow weary, of course, of extreme terms being used to describe common situations. Where do you go from super strong, super pretty, super tall? I imagine that one reason I’m hearing the term used mostly to prefix negative modifiers—hungry, cold, tired, sad, lonely—is that its meaning is shifting again. I’m super tired doesn’t mean I’m beyond any state of fatigue, nor does it mean I am as tired as tired can be; it means I didn’t get enough sleep last night and could use a nap.
Or maybe it’s just that I’m hungry, and I’ll try a little super in the dinning room.