The New York Times-20080128-A Sweet Sundae- No- It-s Primaries

Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080128

A Sweet Sundae? No, It's Primaries

Full Text (410  words)

Super Duper Tuesday sounds like a special mealtime offering at Friendly's or Applebee's. But it is an expression coined last February by Bill Schneider, CNN's senior political analyst, during a discussion on The Situation Room about the crowded calendar for presidential primaries.

Since then, Super Duper Tuesday has been mentioned 71 times on CNN, and it has gained an edge over phrases like Tsunami Tuesday and Giga Tuesday in efforts to distinguish this Feb. 5 from what has traditionally been called Super Tuesday, the date when the greatest number of states hold primary elections.

This year, 24 states, the most ever, are scheduled to hold primaries or caucuses for one or both parties.

It's a pretty standard thing language-wise to do this, said Erin McKean, editor of the language quarterly Verbatim, referring to the super duper coinage, known in linguistics as reduplication. In written and spoken language most people try to strike a balance between attention-getting novelty and getting their point across. One way to do that is vary one part of a phrase and have the rest of it be the same old, same old.

Ms. McKean added: We're all familiar with the concept of comparatives and superlatives -- good, better, best. But you can't do that with 'super.' So how do you make it more intense? You add an intensifier.

'Super duper' is a common phrase but it's a little casual. It has an aura of jokiness, she said. I think the person who coined it must have been thinking how silly it is that all these states are running to the front of the line. But where else can you go? 'Magnificent Tuesday'?

Other language experts said the expanded phrase could be viewed simply as part of the adjective arms race. I think there is a tendency to keep coming up with more extreme superlatives, said Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English dictionary. That's why any existing superlative loses power. 'Awesome' now merely means good.

Whether Super Duper Tuesday will continue to have currency beyond Feb. 5 or go the way of Y2K is uncertain. When Barbara Wallraff, the back-page word columnist for The Atlantic, first heard the expression, I thought it was the right phrase and that we would use it until Super Tuesday was over and we were done talking about it, she said.

We'll see. If I'm right, in four years it will revert to being called Super Tuesday.