daverea.com

One morning this past week, I woke up with the annoying hold music from the Lumber Liquidators customer service line stuck in my head. As I hummed begrudgingly though the tune in the shower, I started recalling some of the voice ads they inserted (rather poorly, I might add) over the music. One was from carpenter/model/actor Ty Pennington, talking about how much he loves using flooring from Lumber Liquidators on his job sites.

Today, Andy’s latest post reminded me of the idea that started nagging me that morning. In Ty’s voice ad spot, he said something along the lines of, “There’s nothing I love more than when a project comes out right…”

That’s a problem for me. And it’s everywhere. People speaking in absolutes, exaggerating the things they’re saying – and as a result, watering down the power of the spoken word.

Hopefully, Ty Pennington isn’t so shallow a person that his life’s greatest love is looking over a freshly-installed floor. I know that can be a source of great satisfaction – it sure was for me when we finished installing the office floor beneath my feet right now – but I sincerely hope that there are things Ty loves more than this. I think, in support of my present premise, it’s a safe assumption to say that there are.

Therein lies the problem: When I hear Ty Pennington endorse a product using language that – when taken literally – conveys such a strong message, his credibility with me goes down a notch. Hearing him say something like this tells me he’s not speaking from the heart, he’s just reading from a script. And whoever wrote that script is contributing to what seems more and more every day like a verbal epidemic.

Listen to any group of high schoolers talk, and you’ll hear it: exaggeration and hyperbole fit for a catastrophe, used to describe the latest hairstyle. A half-hour spent listening to the dialogue on network TV reveals the same issue: people saying things they don’t really mean, in order to make the things they’re saying sound more important.

My favorite example, though? “Dude, I’ll so kill you if you cancelled the HBO.”

Come on, people. Are the things you say really that worthless to you?