Growing up outside of the US, I feel kinda cringed when he said he was "INSANELY proud of our collective teams achieved". Such an interesting cultural difference.
This quirk of dialect should be called the California Superlative.
Everything is awesome, amazing, radical, insane, great, gnarly, not to mention sick, ill, righteous, dope. Californians just love superlatives, use them constantly, wear them out, and need new ones.
This spreads like a fine coating of mold over the rest of the country before going on to annoy the Commonwealth, and then we repeat. It's pretty cool.
Good point, and the place of hella in the dialect is hella distinctive, because it's a superlative modifier: hella sick, hella insane, "I just bought hella strawberries at the market", and so on.
So you have a politeness continuum from very, to hecka, to hella, to fuckin'. Which is dank.
It really seems to me that in American English, every word eventually gets watered down to mean either "good," "bad," or "very." Take the word "terrific" for example. It used to have connotations of terror. Now it's just another synonym for "excellent." Or "fantastic," the old meaning of which is still found in the related "fantastical," but now simply means "very good." Or "incredible," which used to mean "not believable." I could go on.
And when every superlative has been watered down like this, you need to pick a word that's completely over the top to express anything with any strength of feeling. It's good, it's great, it's awesome! It's fantastic! It's incredible!! It's insanely unbelievably wonderful!!!
"Insanely" is just the latest entry in our internal linguistic arms race.
Yep, and people using "absolutely" all the time is the crown jewel.
In the past few years there's been a similar but opposite degradation: the only adverbs anyone uses are "super", "super not", and "not super". I think it came from the infantilized condescending culture on Twitter.
I also believe there would also be a large segment of the US that finds these "job-finding/bragging echo chamber" Twitter posts cringeworthy regardless of context. They appear oddly performative and obligatory. Stay tuned for the follow up "I'm incredibly excited to announce that today I am joining ___" post.
I grew up in the US, and I also found that odd. Not unprecedented, but odd. The literal interpretation of that statement might be more justifiable than the one he meant...
I will expect more people to mock this decade of extreme marketingspeak that was funded with fake money and fat investor pockets. The people doing the mocking will lead the next wave of tech growth
The cultural difference doesn't seem like something to "cringe" over. I also don't think the hyperbolic use is restricted to the US. Pretty much any english speaking country will use "insane" to describe something with emphasis. Certainly normal in the UK and Australia.
> I also don't think the hyperbolic use is restricted to the US.
Strictly restricted? Of course not. But for what it's worth I've been told by numerous Europeans that they perceive casually throwing around extreme hyperbole to be characteristically American behavior. I guess it goes with waitresses pretending to love you.
I agree with the other replies about California Superlative in general, but at least in German it would not be weird for some corporate bro to say he was "WAHNSINNIG stolz..." which means exactly the same thing.
