Fiona McCade: Hyperbole is the worst thing EVER!

Now, I like my sunglasses. I am very, very fond of my sunglasses. But even I have to admit that possession of them would not be worth the sacrifice of anybody’s real, actual life. Besides, if the girl had died for them, what good would it have done her? She couldn’t use them. I’d have just had to prise them back out of her lifeless hands and step over her prone corpse as I went on my gorgeous, vintage way.

So I said: “Are they? Are they really? OK, expire right this minute and they’re yours.” But strangely, she didn’t take me up on my offer. Instead, she backed away, giggling nervously. Just because people often use unnecessary hyperbole doesn’t mean we should always let them get away with it.

Last Sunday, while commentating on Arsenal’s 8-2 defeat by Manchester United, Sky Sports announcer Tony Cascarino had a hideous moment of over-exaggeration, when he described one Arsenal player as having “a holocaust” of a match.

In Tony’s defence, he did say “a holocaust” rather than “The Holocaust”, but even so, was one defender having a bad day really comparable to “total destruction by fire”, which is what the word actually means? The answer to that would have to be… No. And to prove it, all the Arsenal players are still alive and well and earning millions.

But of course Cascarino is not alone in making a fool of himself by verbally over-reacting. According to the hilarious – and now, sadly defunct – Twitter account which chronicled crazy-but-genuine conversations overheard at Condé Nast publications, the New York office of Vogue, the following exchange took place without a hint of irony:

Girl: “Omigod what happened to your knee?!”

Fashion boy: “Oh god, I fell dancing!”

Girl: “Omigod it’s like you came back from the war.”

While you’d hope that reading a little history, or just watching the news occasionally, would put paid to remarks like these, I’m not going to throw the first stone here. Maybe I’m not quite at the level of comparing a dispiriting soccer result to the very earth beneath our feet being scorched to devastation, or a bruised knee to the suffering of bomb-blast trauma, or offering up my life in exchange for stylish eyewear, but I say daft stuff, too.

The other day, my six-year-old announced that he was “starving”. Being a responsible and diligent kind of mother, I pulled him up on it. “No you’re not, you’re just hungry. Starvation is a terrible, terrible thing, which I hope you’ll never experience,” I explained, conscientiously, but then it dawned on me – where did he get that ridiculously overblown vocabulary? From me, that’s where. From his responsible and diligent mother, who says things like: “This is the worst thing EVER!” when I miss the bus, or “I’m living a nightmare!” when the wrong cooker gets delivered.

He might also have picked up a teensy bit of hyperbole from his grandfather, who maintains that every motorway traffic jam is “CHAOS!” when it so patently isn’t. In fact, the sheer immobility of three-lane gridlock – lots of people in cars, staying very still for a very long time – is almost the complete opposite of chaos, as many physicists would be happy to point out to you, Dad, if you’d just stop yelling for a moment and listen.

The worlds of football and fashion are so far removed from normality, I suppose we should expect their inhabitants to show a slight lack of perspective, but it looks like the rot goes deeper than that. Just this week, I’ve heard that the Arsenal defeat was “a massacre”, that my child’s room resembles “the Blitz” and a friend is so unhappy at work, “it’s like being in a gulag”.

We’re all at it. And while Tony Cascarino’s gaffe was toe-curling, at least it’s served as a timely reminder of what’s unacceptable. Because if ludicrous remarks like these should start going unnoticed, Omigod, that really would be, like, completely the worst thing EVER.