GB Olympics Jingo Lingo, 2012

I've been enjoying the absolutely phenomenal London Olympics and especially the language of our national celebration of it: the adverbial pre-modifier absolutely dominating the attempts to articulate the quality of an experience which has then been further bolstered by  the adjectival phenomenal leading into whatever bathetic noun can only follow such linguistic if restricted exuberance.  Does this highlight the limits of our collective vocabulary or indeed the limits of language to capture this experience and reality? In observing this I am not being critical nor cynical. I think these Olympics have been everything superlative that language can only repeat/not wholly embrace in its attempts to articulate.

I thought Danny Boyle's opening ceremony was [place phenomenally positive platitude or neologism here please] and it made this American absolutely proud to also be British: so much of what shapes who I am was represented in Boyle's vision of our history and culture and politics. Even the buffoon Boris, interviewed post-ceremony on Channel 4, wanted to discuss the 'semiotics' of the presentation, joking he could use language like this on such a television channel, and in his inimitable accidental way also touching on how Boyle's filmic and storytelling expertise demonstrates how to overcome the limits of language.

I have only been annoyed by the compulsion of BBC commentators to question athletes failing to achieve gold, or a presumed medal, or to make it through to a final and so on as to what they did wrong and why they failed and how would they explain their disappointment! In this instance, language is geared to perfection to deflect such a miserable querying, and an instant Fuck Off would be absolutely and phenomenally apt.