An Irish Diary

Thrilled beyond belief – An Irishman’s Diary about the incredibly exciting 2016

An abbreviation for ‘incredibly excited’ might be especially useful to sports people, who are at much higher than average risk of this sort of emotional disturbance. Photograph: iStock

Frank McNally's face
Frank McNally
Sat Dec 24 2016 - 00:01

The abbreviation i.e. still stands, as you know, for "id est": meaning "that is".  But if the trend of 2016 persists, I predict it will soon become formalised as shorthand for the state of emotion that ever-larger numbers of people appear to be in these days, especially on social media.

From then on, Tweeters will be able to save time and space by just claiming to be "i.e." about something, instead of wasting 18 of their 140 characters in telling us they're "incredibly excited".

The abbreviation might be especially useful to sports people, who are at much higher than average risk of this sort of emotional disturbance.  Increasingly, I notice, they don't even have to wait for the actual events to be "i.e."

It's standard now for them to claim the condition in advance of a specified "challenge" or "opportunity".  And I suppose there's a certain logic to this.  If you're incredibly excited during the game, you're liable to make mistakes.  Best to get it out of your system at training.

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PR people, of course, can be "i.e." all the time.  But then their job is particularly vulnerable to verbal inflation.  As recently as last year, they might still have got away with claiming to be merely "passionate" about a project.  Now in PR, you're "i.e." or you're nothing.

No doubt consultants will protest that this is client-led.  When I complained here some years ago about the overuse of the word "iconic", a former colleague-turned-PR agreed it was objectionable, but said his customers often insisted.

If the thing they were marketing was old enough for the paint to have dried on it, and if it was already moderately well known, they would want "iconic" somewhere in the press release.  It may now be the same with "i.e.": if your competitors are claiming to be incredibly excited about something, you don't want to sound emotionally frigid by comparison.

Excitement aside, "incredibly" may in general have been the most overused prefix of 2016.  When people weren't incredibly excited this year, they were incredibly proud, or incredibly hopeful, or incredibly sad.

Nor was it just about emotions.  In connection with TV or cinema, there was a notable tendency on social media to find performances "incredibly believable".

I would nominate the i-word for the Adverb of the Year award if "bigly" hadn't already rigged the vote.  But just like bigly, "incredibly" is a term for the Trump Era: implying as it does that, as well as being post-truth, we're now also post-belief.

In retrospect, I believe the rise of the Trump phenomenon was accidentally foretold in the 2004 Pixar movie, The Incredibles, in which a cartoon family with supposed superpowers sets out to make America great again.

As if to confirm this, when I searched for the term "incredibly excited" in the Irish Times archive just now, the very first hit was from the President-elect's son, Dash - I mean, Eric - speaking last about his plans for Doonbeg.

I was very surprised, by the way, that the oldest use of term in the archive was from way back in 1865. But on closer inspection, this proved to be the related adjective-noun combination, "incredible excitement", which would indeed have a longer history.

In that case, the town of Carlow was said to be in a state of "i.e", after the arrest of local Fenians.  But even in adjective-noun form, the i.e. phrase did not appear again until 1907, when it featured in the gardening column.  And it was a full century after the first instance that a third case was reported, in the sports pages of 1965.

Since then, incidences have been on the rise, with a positive welter of cases in the last 12 months.  Even the science community is now infected.  When Einstein's gravitational waves were finally confirmed last February, some physicists reached for the "i.e." phrase, even though Richard Dawkins would surely reserve "incredible excitement" as a description of religious phenomena.

Mind you, the "i.e." hits for 2016 also included a report on the Longford-Westmeath election recount.  Which, you may recall, arose from close voting between Labour's Willie Penrose and Fine Gael's James Bannon.  Lawyers duly descended on the hall for a forensic, five-day trawl of hanging chads and other irregularities. And the then Labour leader Joan Burton was said to find this  "incredibly exciting".  But in that case, at least, you'd suspect she meant the i-word literally.

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