In a provocative New Year's resolution for 2026, political analyst Professor Mark Kenny has called on Australians to purge superfluous superlatives like "absolutely" and "completely" from daily conversation. The Canberra Times columnist and Australian National University scholar warns that this linguistic inflation is bleaching nuance from public discourse and poses a genuine threat to democratic engagement.
The Epidemic of Empty Superlatives
Kenny identifies what he terms "hyperbolisms" as now legion in Australian media and political communication. He argues these words add nothing of substance, instead undermining the very adjectives they aim to intensify. He points to frequent, meaningless constructions heard from politicians, such as a government being "completely focused" on multiple competing priorities simultaneously, or an opposition labelling a policy an "absolute disgrace."
The problem, as Kenny sees it, is that when standard political dialogue is saturated with endemic overstatement, language loses its power for moments that genuinely demand public outrage or engagement. The verbal escalation leaves nowhere to go, reducing serious debate to a monotonous shout.
From Coffee Shops to Parliament: The Casualty of Authenticity
The decay of meaningful language isn't confined to Question Time. Kenny observes it in everyday exchanges, where ordering a coffee routinely elicits responses of "awesome" or "amazing." This casual overuse, he contends, depletes the descriptive power available for life's truly significant moments. Another linguistic pet peeve he highlights is the rampant use of "impact" and the clumsy derivative "impactful," which he suggests often serve as euphemisms where clearer, more accurate words like "harmed" or "affected" would suffice.
The issue extends beyond mere irritation for grammarians. Kenny connects the hollowing out of precise language to the erosion of the political centre-ground in democracies like Australia. He suggests the once-dominant Liberal Party's struggles may be partly ascribed to a public square that has "stopped hearing nuance, stopped noticing subtlety." This environment, he warns, creates a tailwind for polarising populists and nationalists who thrive in a climate of rhetorical excess.
A Warning from History: The Link Between Words and Truth
Drawing on the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, Kenny elevates the stakes of the debate. Arendt, in a 1973 interview, argued that when words are stripped of meaning, society is on a path to surrendering truth itself. "If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer," Arendt observed, a state that deprives people of their capacity to think, judge, and act.
Kenny provocatively questions whether belligerent authoritarians like former US President Donald Trump and UK politician Nigel Farage intuitively understand this mechanism. Their success, he implies, is facilitated by a public discourse already weakened by hyperbolic, meaningless language.
The solution proposed is simple yet profound: a collective return to linguistic precision. By dumbing the volume down from 11 and choosing words with care, Australians can begin to reclaim a public square capable of hosting reasoned debate, distinguishing between minor failings and major scandals, and ultimately, preserving the foundational link between language and truth.
