It is an important object of attention not to talk in superlatives, so as neither to offend against truth nor to give a mean idea of one's understanding... Exaggeration is a branch of lying.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
The inflation works exactly like the monetary kind: each overstatement buys a little attention now and devalues every future statement. The colleague for whom everything is "a disaster" or "a game-changer" trains the room, within a year, to divide everything he says by three. Then one day something truly is urgent, and he discovers his currency no longer clears. Calibrated speech runs the compounding in reverse: say "good, not exceptional" when it is good, flag "this one is serious" only when it is, and slowly your plain sentences start carrying more weight than other people's italics.
Practice
- Ration your superlatives to a handful a year; scarcity is what gives "exceptional" its purchasing power.
- Report in ranges and evidence rather than adjectives; "grew about a third" outranks "grew massively" in every serious room.
- When praising, be exact instead of extreme: named specifics land as truth, generic raving lands as noise.
Use this when
- Use this hardest in writing, where the italics cannot be softened by your face and are archived forever.
- Use it in recommendations: the mentor who calls everyone brilliant has recommended no one.
Ignore this when
- Don't flatten into monotone; calibration means the scale is real, not that everything scores five out of ten.
- Don't under-claim past honesty either; systematic self-discounting is inverted exaggeration and misleads the same way.
A picture of it
Two analysts brief the same committee for years. One opens every quarter with "unprecedented", "critical", "massive". The other reports in flat numbers and once, in four years, says: "I am worried about this one." The room's reaction to that single sentence, budgets moved, meetings called, is a currency event: years of calibration cashed in one moment. Her colleague had spent the same years printing money nobody accepted anymore.
Speak plainly all year and your one alarm will empty the building. Shout weekly and the fire will find them at their desks.