Making ‘Great’ Great Again: Reclaiming A Favorite Adjective
I have always been on the lookout for alternatives to the word ‘great,’ and I suspect that in the Trump Era, the growing use of ‘awesome,’ ‘stellar,’ ‘excellent’ and similar adjectives happened as a direct result of Trump’s cheapening of the word ‘great.’ Let’s make ‘Great’ great again.
I’m always looking for new adjectives to describe good things. In 2015 or so, when Donald Trump chose the campaign slogan “Make American Great Again,” the word ‘great’ became instantly cheapened as an attention-getting shorthand for something else. What did ‘great’ mean? Was it, as those on the left asserted, a code word for a time when minorities knew their places and when a white majority ruled? Or was it, as the right claimed, a message of hope, a reclamation of a time when American exceptionalism ruled the day?
And was America ever ‘great?’ As the late comedian George Carlin once said, the U.S. ‘was founded by a group of slaveholders who wanted to be free!” The irony of claiming there was ever an American Golden Age is apparent. Despite our high ideals and accomplishments, in every age of our history there have been millions, or tens of millions, left behind and excluded from the ‘American Dream.’
Back to the word ‘great’ itself. Among my friends, ‘great’ has been for decades going back to my childhood, an ideal way to describe events that had a strong emotional impact. That band is ‘great.’ That prank you pulled on Dennis was ‘great!’ I saw Tedd exercising his pig on the slopes at the high school — it was great!” But now, thanks to the stigma of Donald Trump’s policies and how he has used the word, ‘great’ has become not just a cliché, but a reminder of regressive policies and misguided egoism, nothing but a signifier in an opportunistic slogan.
I wish to reclaim the word. I want to use ‘great’ in the same innocent spirit that I used it when I was in my teens. I vow to reserve it for those occasions that mean something, that are profound and lovely. I need to rescue the word great from its use in a cheap political strategy.
I have always been on the lookout for alternatives to great, and I suspect that in the Trump Era, the growing use of ‘awesome,’ ‘stellar,’ ‘excellent’ and similar adjectives happened as a direct result of Trump’s cheapening of the word ‘great.’ Let’s make “Great” great again. Let’s use great again, perhaps with irony, perhaps without.
'Great' doesn’t require any special emphasis or exertion to reclaim its place in the sun — we must simply use it as we did before, in the days before it became political currency. We must use it sincerely, to excise it from its callous abuse in the political arena. We must make “Great” great again.
