Quickness

John Madden, this one's for you.

See, quickness is John's favorite adjective (well, actually dumbo, it's a noun), and it's migrated into the vocabularies of all sorts of commentators, usually sports-related. The problem is that it's a stupid word. Either it means speed, in which case saying, "He's got great speed and quickness," as they sometimes do is redundant, or it means something different from speed, in which case, what.

I just dislike the word, that's all. Does it mean agility? Why not say agility? Are you afraid we are too stupid to understand the word, or are you too stupid to know it.

It's like nice. Nice is a bland word suitable for bland topics. And there's nothing wrong with using it every once in a while. But in a world where superlatives are king (sports writers and commentators love superlatives), why not go for a bigger word? Why not, "personable," or, "superb," or, "reasonable?" Why not one of the millions of words the English language possesses which mean roughly the same thing as nice?

We English speakers are fortunate to live with synonyms out the wazoo, and when we continually use one word, we get boring quickly. Or with quickness, rather. There's nothing which says that you need to be a snooty word-monger to use interesting words. Alacrity works just as well as quickness, or speed, or fastness, or any number of other ways of saying that someone moves quickly, or whatever the hell quickness is supposed to mean. See, that's what bothers me: what is quickness? It's a sports term with no definition which is used too often.

So stop talking about quickness and tell us something we really can understand. Don't deal is vague generalities. Tell us how the player is quicker. You hear?