My legendary post

It’s the laziest word in the world. So lazy, in fact, it’s legendary.

Actually, that’s what it is: legendary. The word. And it suffers two fatal flaws: 1. prolonged, comprehensive, nauseating overuse; 2. ludicrous biographical and descriptive hyperinflation.

What set me to ruminating was the Times referring to former Dodger pitcher Fernando Valenzuela as “legendary.” But my agita’s been building since 2014 when I saw the term applied to Billy Joel. Now I might accept it of Fernando, the Mexican-born man-mountain, bane of big-league bats and hero (a related and no less dangerous word) to his people.

But the Piano Man?

Do you really think future generations are going to judge Joel as more than a sidelight to the saga of song? Popular, yes. But mythic, epic, storied, historic, Homeric, outsized, almost unreal in his persona and/or accomplishments, perhaps not real at all, so terrific he ranks with the likes of Paul Bunyan, Rosa Parks, Odysseus and the Chupacabra? Not to mention Little Richard and the Loch Ness Monster?

Don’t give me a heart attack-ack-ack.

But that’s beside the point. The point is to slay the legendary beast, to rid the lexicon of the sloth, tedium, imprecision, ennui and toxic emptiness that is conveyed every time the word appears, to ensure that next time you or I want to say famous or great or really cool, but in a fancy way, we don’t fail our obligation to clarity and culture by saying what everyone else says.

Which is — invariably, inescapably, incalculably — legendary.

Every actor or rock star past 40 and still ambulatory, regardless of accomplishments, is called legendary. Come to think of it, so are the non-ambulatory, the stars who died at 27. But that’s show biz, legendary’s hometown. Consider some of the not-at-all legendary people, places and things so anointed:

Slobs. There are a million cute stories every year on the July 4th eating contest in Coney Island, speaking of nauseating. Every one refers to Takeru Kobayashi — the guy who can shove down 69 hot dogs with no regard for his stomach or ours — as “legendary.” Time magazine or time.com (or whatever you call that doddering media thingamajig) named him, in reverent initial caps, the “Legendary Competitive Eater.” All of which should be enough to make a copy editor — or even Kobayashi’s legendary arch-rival Joey Chestnut — puke.

Limburger. Food and Wine had the fin-de-siecle temerity to refer in its pages to “four legendary cheeses.” Typo? Did they mean Jesus?

Gallagher. Then there’s this “legendary comedian,” who with his watermelon and oversized hammer never was the latter and therefore can’t be the former. His elevation is part of a conspiracy among suburban dinner theaters, which routinely, reflexively, describe coming comedy attractions — humorists of varying renown and unvarying mediocrity, from Jay Leno to Rich Little — with that magic word they believe will goose box office among the credulous.

Garbage. Not the band*, actual trash. “The legendary Atari dump,” an article named this spot in New Mexico where the console maker apparently plowed under a bunch of games 30 years ago. The dump is legendary because people don’t know if it’s real. Which means the story teeters on apocryphal. But, OK, that’s a legend — if a nerdy one. Still, a pit full of garbage? (*This just in, about the band, from Stereogum: “Garbage has a sort of mythic origin story…”)

Zeroes and ones. The scriveners of Time are besotted with the L-word. A quick Google of its archives returns ten-thousand hits. Were I an ethnolinguist, I might hypothesize that Time was the progenitor and propagator of the word’s popular over-usage. But even Time was pushing the envelope of its emptiness when describing the music software WinAmp as “legendary.”

Human logic (vs., say, squirrel logic???): The Atlantic points out: “Our ability to reason is as legendary as our ability to manipulate.” Begging the question: legendary to whom?

The Sixties. Shudder to think how many people, places and things from the Sixties have been dubbed “legendary.” Salman Rushdie’s memoir doubles- or triples-down: “In the summer of 1967…I rented a room in London above a legendary boutique — legendary, I mean, at the time; there was something about it that was instantly recognized as mythic…”

Combo platter. Maybe it started with that “Eric Clapton is God” grafitti in Rushdie’s London. But when legendary is not enough, the legendary get called other grandiose things. So when Frankie Knuckles died, his obit not only identified him as the “legendary Chicago House DJ,” but as “godfather of House.” Which, however accurate, may be one encomium too many. Not unlike the double-necked panegyric The New Yorker hung on an exhibition by master guitar-makers, whom they called “Heroes and Legends.” But if you like your legends in stereo, how about “the legendary musician David Crosby” discovering the “iconic music legend” Joni Mitchell? (“Iconic,” I’m coming for you next.)

Time-travel. Most curious, a new book chronicles the fabrication — literal and figurative — of a future legend. It’s subtitled: “The Race to Build the World’s Most Legendary Watch.” Note that the wrung-out term now requires the Viagral modifier “most” and “legendary” has gone from retrospective accolade, based on achievement or import, to engineering spec. Thus, perhaps, ensuring a mass-produced supply of bullshit for generations to come.

I can only conclude with the quote often attributed to the legendary newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst that’s actually a quote from the legendary movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

And in every mouth and medium today, we do.