'Extreme' Products Are Extremely Annoying

It's kind of scary, but the Chinese are pulling ahead of us again. Not in manufacturing. Not in innovation. Not even in kung pao chicken. Worse! They have trumped us Americans when it comes to our ace in the hole: advertising slogans.

They're outlawing them.

Not all of them — just the ones that are way too overused, starting with "rich" and "beautiful." So claims a friend of mine who went to a business meeting in Beijing. He said he was surprised to learn the government banned these words on the grounds that "they were just showing up so often in so many ads that people found them irritating."

Whoo-hoo! Let's hear it for a repressive, pseudo-communist, quasi-fascist government! Right on! At least … right on when it comes to advertising. But now it is up to us to leapfrog ahead.

I propose that America institute a ban on all of our own irritating, stupid, trite, insulting and meaningless ad words, which float around like garbage in the bathtub of our consciousness. And I propose we begin with the word "extreme."

Also, "x-treme."

"Extreme" is so ridiculously overused that the other day, I picked up my son's spiral notebook — a notebook filled with 70 standard-issue, empty , college-ruled pages — and it said on the cover, "Extreme Notebook."

Yeah — extremely generic! And to think it is used by a boy who brushes his teeth with Aquafresh Extreme Clean. Like, what was Aquafresh before that? Aquafresh Sorta Clean? Aquafresh Better Than Brushing Your Teeth With Mop Water?

You can find Pop Rocks Xtreme candy, extreme platform shoes, Doritos Extreme tortilla chips, extreme energy drinks — that's a whole category — and for a while there, T.G.I.

Friday's was serving an entire "Extreme" menu. (I guess deep-frying everything but the breadbasket just wasn't enough.)

Such extreme-ism was born back with the extreme games of last century, of course, when the hippest kids shunned team sports and took to things such as skateboarding instead. Then came the pile-on of the X Games, in which the "X" stood for X-tremely dumb and dangerous — which naturally led kids to think, "Cool!"

Pretty soon, every product that yearned to be youthful — even the spiral notebook — had a new moniker. I'm sure the creative geniuses behind them thought this was new and improved (to coin a phrase).

These copywriters are the same folks who, when they can't get away with "extreme," immediately leap to their second-most loved word: "smart." Smart cars, smart cards, smart phones (although if my phone were really smart, it would say: "Hey, wait! You're forgetting me on the nightstand! Come back!")

And anything that isn't smart, you may have noticed, is "green." It could be a single-use wipe impregnated with radioactive DDT, but if it's sitting in a package made of partly recycled newsprint, it's going to let you know.

Between "green," "extreme," "E-Z," "smart," "intelligent" and the ubiquitous "2.0" (even though no one is quite sure what 1.0 is — or was), we are every bit as brainwashed as the Chinese, at least when it comes to consuming.

They have said, "Enough already!"

How extremely smart.

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist at Advertising Age. She is the founder of FreeRangeKids.com and the author of the upcoming book "Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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