My Relationship with the Word “Epic”

I hate it. How it became a colloquialism* is beyond me. Unless you’re using it to describe a battle or a tale or a novel, then hearing it just makes me want to pay a little kid five bucks to kick you and run away.

Louis C.K. artfully articulates our mutual hatred for other people in his comedy special “Hilarious” when he talks about how stupid we all sound now…

(I’m guessing a few of you didn’t listen to that whole thing since its a thousand minutes long, so I grabbed the part that was really relevant. If you have a minute though, it’s worth it – Louis C.K. is a genius)(He’s also oddly sexy)(But then again I recently discovered something about myself and that’s that I love gingers, which is so embarrassing – and also a post for another day)

“Anyway I was listening to the two guys, and one of them used a word that really pissed me off. It was how he used it. He used the word hilarious. Thats one of those words that we use where we don’t care what it means. We go right to the top shelf with our words now. We don’t think about how we talk. We just say right to the –

‘Dude it was amazing. It was amazing.’

Really you were amazed? You were amazed by a basket of chicken wings? Really? Amazing. What are you gunna do with the rest of your life now? What if something really happens to you? What if Jesus comes down from the sky and makes love to you all night long and leaves the new living lord in your belly? What are you gunna call that? You used amazing on a basket of chicken wings! You’ve limited yourself verbally to a shit life!”

Epic. Top shelf word. If your night was epic you better have lost one of your friends and made a trade with Asian gangsters for the wrong guy only to find that when you were blackout you put him up on the roof. Otherwise, I don’t want to hear about the night you came ‘this close’ to having a threesome. Not epic.

Acceptable times to use the word “epic”

1. The Trojan War was an epic battle.

2. Harry Potter is an epic tale of heroism, triumph of good over evil, and three kids going through puberty.

3. The Bible is an epic novel.

Unacceptable times to use the word “epic”:

1. Last night was epic

2. That was epic.

3. Epic.

4. Or any other usage that differs from the three aforementioned appropriate times to say “epic”

 

 

*Colloquialism – one of the two words I learned for the SATs