Saturday, June 25, 2011

Beyond X

People in the past few years have taken to using "beyond" as a superlative.  "That girl is beyond beautiful" to mean "extremely beautiful."  Beyond does not mean more-than.  It means on the other side of, or farther than.

Recently, on NPR of all places, a commentator described someone's politics as "beyond San Francisco" to mean "extremely liberal" (or, at least, more liberal than San Francisco).  I'm sorry, beyond San Francisco is the pacific ocean, not more San Francisco-ish-ness.

"Beyond" is a place in space, not an increase in intensity.  Since we have plenty of terms to describe the latter, let's not corrupt "beyond" into one of them.  It amazes me how frequently people want to remove the unique usefulness of a word.

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