Misuse of superlatives

Now a days I hear/read 'Biggest ever sale', 'The greatest move', 'The largest ....' and so on. Its just a misuse of superlatives.

Worst misuse of superlatives ever!

Best comment ever!

This is what astronomers do with telescopes.

There's the Very Large Telescope. Then they want to build a bigger one. So they call that the European Extremely Large Telescope. And what if you want an even bigger one? You call it the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.

I wonder what the next one is going to be called. The Incredible Unimaginably Large Telescope?

BFT

Mike Simmons wrote:BFT

What does it mean?

John Jai wrote:

Mike Simmons wrote:BFT

What does it mean?

Brewery Federation of Tee-totalers

Jesper de Jong wrote:I wonder what the next one is going to be called. The Incredible Unimaginably Large Telescope?

I hereby propose The Largest Scope You Can Describe In Nine Words. Given how astronomers name their discoveries, the TLSYCDINW acronym will go well with them.

Size of the Entire Universe Telescope

Oh My God It's So Big You'll Faint Telescope

Martin Vajsar wrote:I hereby propose The Largest Scope You Can Describe In Nine Words. Given how astronomers name their discoveries, the TLSYCDINW acronym will go well with them.

So the next one should be The Largest Scope You Can Describe In Exactly Ten Words, or TLSYCDIETW.

See? This scheme has a potential!

There was a Saturday Night Live skit in which a stupid celebrity journalist interviewed an astronomer.

Journalist: How large is (I forget the details)?
Scientist: It is very large.
Journalist: How large?
Scientist: (giving a visualization)
Journalist: That is very, _very_ large.
Scientist: Yes.
Journalist: But you said it was _very_ large.
Scienist: So?
Journalist: So you were wrong.

I often wish that ads using "ultimate" to describe their products were using the original (and still primary) sense of the word, i.e., the last.