It's time to retire the adjective incredible and the adverb incredibly. A Google search of the web found approximately 835,000,000 uses of these words - somewhat more for the adverb than for the adjective. For the present into the middle future they have about as much value as did the Papiermark during the German hyperinflation of 1921-23. By comparison, the much-used expletives shit and fuck found their way to the Internet 89,000,000 and 171,000,000. Even allowing that shit and fuck can't get past the network standards departments - premium channels not included, it's a blowout for the i-words.

But overuse is not the whole of this offense against the subtlety and nimbleness of the English language. It is the mindlessness that their use puts on display, the shallow unoriginality of the demographic that I take to be the sons and daughters of the boomer generation. For it is from the mouths of the 20-40 year-olds that these leaden nuggets fall most readily.

I was alerted to this incoming tide of fatuity by hearing a young prosecutor describe someone as "an incredible witness," and later when the testimony of the witness was said to be "incredibly credible." A speaker less interested in fashionable utterances delivered at high speed in the manner of a cable host or a fourth at a frat house bong party would described her witness as - merely - credible, meaning believable or plausible or persuasive - three adjectives that are not precisely equal, but that illustrate what is meant by "shades of meaning."

A great many citations of "incredible witness" employ the words as they should be employed, that is, as comments on a witness who could not be believed. Others, like this and this and this one about a woman who broke up a robbery by turning "to Jesus," are evidence that the speaker or writer said the first thing that passed through his mind, meaning a recent thing that passed from the TV or the Internet or his bud, and ignored the 45,000 adjectives to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary, most of them, by now, far more vivid and serviceable than incredible. By the way, it's interesting to see how many misuses of incredible are linked to a religious experience or an attempt to convince a reader or auditor of one's deep and sincere feeling about the supernatural. Humbug breeds superficiality.

To say more would mark me as one possessed - a crank - so I shall leave it there with a mere smattering of synonyms taken from Thesaurus.com:

beyond belief - absurd, far-fetched, fishy, flimsy*, implausible,impossible, improbable, incogitable,inconceivable, insupposable, out of the question,outlandish, phony, preposterous, questionable,ridiculous, rings phony, suspect, thin*,unbelievable, unconvincing, unimaginable,


Far-fetched - bizarre, doubtful, dubious, eccentric, fantastic,fishy, forced, hard to swallow, illogical,implausible, improbable, incoherent,inconsequential, incredible , labored,preposterous, queer, recondite, strained,strange, suspicious, unbelievable, unconvincing,unlikely, unnatural, unrealistic

Unconvincing - assailable, baseless, contemptible,controvertible, fallacious, false, feeble, frivolous,groundless, illogical, improbable, inadequate,inane, inconceivable, incredible , inept, lame,poor, puerile, superficial, thin, transparent,trifling, trivial, unbelievable, ungrounded,unpersuasive, unreasonable, unsatisfactory,unsubstantial, weak, weakly, wishful


I have omitted from this list the word awesome which, with one billion-210-million hits on the web, deserves its own retirement party.