let’s shoot the word SUPER in the back of the head!

The girl in the cafe is excited. She’s not wickedly excited or outrageously excited or deliriously excited or giddily excited or awesomely excited. Or any of the other great qualifiers our language is blessed with.

No she’s super excited and doesn’t she just have the jazz hands to show it. Why has this shit superlative suddenly become a vogue word? I don’t get it. Did I miss the meeting where we all got made honorary German exchange students?

It’s such a prissy, buttoned-up word. Every time I hear it I feel like cutting off my own balls and wearing them as ear-rings as I prance around the room singing The Sound of Music.

(Don’t worry, professional help is being sought).

It just seems to me that in the past we were more inventive with our superlatives.

When I was growing up a good thing could be: sweet, smart, ace, tops, fab, the bomb, the business, lish, mad, class, crucial. Or if you fancied more bite: wicked, savage, nasty.

Compared to this super’s like the kid with the scrubbed face in the corner whose been told his hands will drop off if he touches himself.

If you’re not convinced about what a bad word it is take a look at where it was getting used before its current vogue.

The supermarket. Oww that’s a fun place to hang out. Superman. What a charismatic, multilayered character he is. The Super Bowl. Idiots running headfirst at one another. The superego. My parents controlling me still through my own unconscious. Sounds a hoot!

And why do we need another superlative anyway? Especially one that’s been floating around in the detritus at the bottom of the word barrel for so long. Isn’t it about time we reined in this culture of false hype? It’s turning us all into first-grade morons.

Take the girl in the cafe. I don’t know what she was so super excited about but I can imagine that in all likelihood it probably wasn’t that super exciting. It probably wasn’t even just plain exciting. She was probably going to Target to get a new coat.

But these days there’s an unwritten social contract where we all have to pretend like the mundane events of our daily life are so great we should be spluffing in our pants at the very thought of them (“You’re going to get a coffee! Wow! Nice!”). Either that or they’re so awful they hardly bear thinking about (“You’re doctor says you can only have decaf. Man, that’s tragic!”).

If you offer no enthusiasm either way, people will assume you’re depressed. Which is depressing.

But it’s important to keep things in proportion. Otherwise when something truly impressive happens you’ll have trouble naming it for what it is. This happens all the time in 24-hour news. They expend so much energy spewing out fevered hype about non-stories that when a real story comes along – like the Boston bombings last year – everyone goes into shock and doesn’t know what to say.

Don’t get me wrong. I like a bit of hyperbole now and again (witness the title of this piece) but hyperbole all the time is rubbish. Witness the way the word ‘love’ has become so hackneyed through over use.

So let’s all take a deep collective breath, find some perspective, and…. deep breath out…. stop saying that shit word.

And don’t even get me started on super dooper.

what makes us better than a neanderthal?

This story was published on CNN’s science blog, Light Years, on April 6, 2012.

How did modern humans conquer the planet? It’s one of the most intriguing questions in the whole of science.

Right now, sitting pretty at the top of the food chain, it’s tempting to see our 200,000-year rise to power since the emergence of the first homo sapiens as a fait accompli: The evolutionary endpoint of a story that got started on the African savannah via the two key innovations of bigger brains and the shift to walking upright.

Yet for our ancestors things were not so clear cut. For a start they were not (as we now find ourselves) the only game in town. When Cro-Magnon (ancestors of modern humans) migrated north from Africa’s Rift Valley to settle Europe around 40,000 years ago, the continent was already populated by another breed of hominid, the Neanderthals. Within a few thousands years the Neanderthals were wiped out and the Cro-Magnon had taken over.

Why was this? What special attributes did our ancestors possess that the Neanderthals did not?

As Ian Tattersall, curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History points out, the fossil record often throws up more questions than answers. Neanderthal skeletons, for example, show that they had stronger builds and the same-sized brains as Cro-Magnon. They were sophisticated tool-makers and animal remains found at Neanderthal sites reveal they were skilled hunters, expert in bringing down large prey such as woolly mammoths. Based on this evidence there is no obvious reason why we made it and they did not.

But Tattersall thinks we need to look beyond the fossil record to find the secret to our success. One place to start looking, he says, is in the Lascaux caves in southern France. Discovered accidentally in 1940 by four children, the Lascaux cave complex contains hundreds of paintings of animal figures in caverns larger than football fields.

Talking at the museum this week to promote his new book, “Masters of the Planet: The Search for Human Origins”, Tattersall describes a visit to the caves as “one of the most profound experiences of my life.” It’s more than just the beauty of the paleolithic art that moved him, however. The cave paintings, he says, prove early man’s ability to think symbolically. Horses drawn on to the cave walls are symbolic representations of real life horses.

No other species of early human left artwork behind and this, he says, is the crucial difference.

The capacity for abstract thinking is the key to our success. All our creativity stems from it. But abstract thinking is not only useful for making art. Early hunters, for example, reporting back on the movement of reindeer herds would be disadvantaged if those hearing the report could not make the mental leap of faith needed to understand that these herds existed even though they had not seen them.

“It is this capacity for ‘what if’ thinking that sets humans apart from all other creatures,” says Tattersall. He says it’s no coincidence that this advance in human cognition came along at the same time as language. “Symbolic thinking is impossible to imagine without language,” he says.

There is no evidence either way to tell us whether Cro-Magnon spoke language with each other, though Tattersall is certain they did. It’s also impossible to say if linguist ability was something early humans acquired or it was innate. Noted linguist Noam Chomsky has argued the later. He believes humans are born with an ability to learn oral language. Hence a toddlers amazing talent for stringing words together in the proper order even though they may never have heard the sentences before.

According to Tattersall, humans may have possessed the ability for language for millions of years before some, as yet unknown, cultural stimulus set it in motion. This is a common trend of evolution, says Tattersall, who has been researching our history through the fossil record since the 1960s and has written several books on the subject. “Birds had feathers for millions of years before they learned to fly. You acquire a feature and, much later on, you find a use for it.”

Of course, the capacity for symbolic thought is just one theory of how humans got to the top of the food chain, and there are many others.

It may have been, as some anthropologists have argued, that in a prehistoric age where nature was red in tooth and claw and fearsome predators such as saber-toothed tigers roamed the landscape, our ancestors were simply the most efficient at killing off the competition. Disease or drought may have played a part; so too may climate change.

That human’s unique way of seeing the world helped them on their rise to becoming the masters of the planet seems indisputable, however. Whether it was the one, big thing that made all the difference; that we may never know.