Fantastic!

It would be interesting—well, fairly interesting—to know how many words we have in English to express approval or admiration.

One way to find out would be to look up, say, "good" in an online thesaurus or synonym dictionary, then follow the trail of all the words you get through all the other thesauruses you can find online and paste all the lists into a database. Write a few lines of code to eliminate the duplicates, then decide how far you go in excluding obscure, obsolete, slang, dialect 'gradely'), and facetious coinages ('splendiferous'), and you will finish up with a very long list. Anyone who would like to attempt this task (or has a better way of doing it) should send me his or her list, and if it has a total of two thousand or more (and I agree with the principle of the exclusions) I will send a cheque for $50 to some appropriate charity.

Some readers may ask why I am doing this.

Having obtained such a list I would present a copy of it to certain moderately well educated people of my acquaintance (no names, they know who they are) in order to shame them by pointing out that they demean themselves by the way in which they always use the same adjective when they want to tell you that they like something. With thousands to choose from, they cannot be bothered to find something fresh and really apt, so from laziness and habit out comes the same tired old word, time after time, whether they are describing the weather, a play, an ascent of Everest, a steak, a pole vault, a book, a hat, a pile ointment, a lover, or whatever....he (she, it) is (was) FANTASTIC!

Or, often, absolutely fantastic!