I’m So Excited

July 27, 2021
Posted by Jay Livingston

The French, says Julie Barlow (here), don’t show excitement. They don’t even have a word for it, or if they do, it’s not our word. Je suis excité implies arousal that is physical, not emotional. In France, it’s difficult to say you’re excited.

Not so in the US. Barlow quotes a bilingual American in France who says that the French can in fact express excitement. It’s just that most of the time they prefer not to.

The American public, he says, has been trained “to have a fake, almost cartoonish view on life, in which superficial excitement and false happiness are the norm.” By comparison, he notes, in France, “excitement is typically shown only when it is truly meant.”

      
Excitement is indeed the norm to the point that it looks like excitement inflation. Where people once might have been “glad” do or say something, they are now excited.  Three years ago, my university e-mail brought this message from IT   

The Web Services team, in collaboration with groups across the University, is very excited to announce the latest round of completed projects in support of our ongoing comprehensive redesign of the montclair.edu website.

The trend may be more noticeable to us older folks whose language still belongs to the era before excitement inflation. I doubt that anyone else who saw this e-mail wondered about the excitement sweeping through IT. Or maybe they just didn’t notice.

Each year, at our first college meeting, department chairs who have been lucky enough to get a line or two introduce their new faculty. When I did this in my last year as chair, introducing Tim Gorman, I began something like this:

I don’t know if you’ve been on a search committee and read applications lately, but one of the things that struck me this time was that most of the applicants say they’re excited. “I’m excited to be applying to Montclair State.” “I’m very excited to be applying for the position . . . “ A lot of them began like that.

And all I could think was that either these people lead very dull lives [this got some quiet  laughter] or else they know something about this place that I, in my four decades here, have yet to discover. [more laughter, which is really all that I cared about]

So when I read Tim’s letter and it began, “I’m applying for the position” or something like that, I thought, now here is a man with reasonable sense of proportion.   

I don’t have any systematic data on this inflation of the excitement, but the laughter of the faculty at that meeting tells me that I was onto something.