please don't say things are increasingly happening

a brief plea

Few words irritate me like “increasingly.” When I was an editor I made a point of striking it out whenever I noticed it. Once I had a teacher who would go through and strike any use of “the nature of” and “the fact that” because (he said) you should not make claims about nature and facts unless you really mean to do so. I think of him every time I use “the fact that” anyway because I can’t think of a better phrase in the moment. Sorry sir.

My relationship to “increasingly” is similar: you should not use it unless you know that you are talking about something that is in fact increasing. A few days ago I was reading a review that dropped three increasinglies in the first paragraph, which I’d like to believe is some sort of record, but which is probably only a minor league achievement. Here is my own pastiche of how this sort of thing reads to me:

Increasingly, in our ever-more connected times, as our lives become wider but shallower, we have become fish without depths to plumb. We survive in the scant waters of the pond of culture, increasingly prey to birds and cats and even the occasional toddler, often stuck in the mud, unable to see that we are dying because we cannot stop watching video microblogs on our phones. Indeed increasingly we have forgotten that there was ever such a thing as deeper water, so entranced we are with the specter of the labubu. Now, more than ever, one recalls the French Marxist and critical theorist Guy Debord’s belief that we live in the society of the spectacle. As the pop siren Britney Spears sang in her luminous 2007 album Blackout: “It’s Britney, bitch / I see you.” Indeed.

In Puppy Go Bark Bark Bark: A Board Book, the children’s author Jenny McJenson.…

And so on and so on and so on.

Many are the sins of blogging, but “increasingly” is the sort of terrible word that thrives in the professional environment. That is because “increasingly” is a way of faux historicizing. It gives whatever you’re saying an aura of knowledge, even of expertise, but does not really give the reader either of these things. You can, without falsehood, say that we were less entranced by the labubu¹ in the past, something that is undoubtedly true because the labubu did not exist except perhaps in the pure Platonic realm of forms. Between “no entrancement” and “any entrancement” lies an increase.

In the case of the labubu, all this use of “increasingly” accomplishes is what our pastiche writer might call ever more annoying battles in the world of faux history. Oh, so the “writer” of this “article” thinks that we didn’t have fads before phones? What of the Beanie Baby? The pet rock? The tulip bulb? The music of Franz Liszt? Don’t you enjoy the music of Liszt, you uncultured swine? The original 360 party girl? These arguments become ever ever more annoying when applied to things that might matter, like “political polarization,” in which you end up with people on the one hand saying the cast of Hamilton was rude to Mike Pence, we’ve been more divided and people on the other hand saying 🤣 this guy doesn’t know we had a civil war 🤣 and so on.

The real trouble with “increasingly” is that it doesn’t mean anything. It injects a sense of urgency and even (thanks to the faux history) expertise, but does not actually provide either reasons for an occasion to be urgent or knowledge. If you single it out in any given paragraph and ask “what is this doing here? can the writer justify this claim?” the answers are usually nothing and no. Every word that doesn’t mean something is taking up the spot of a word that could. Every refusal to be precise and think about the implications of one’s language means arguments that are worse. To say that something is increasingly happening is to make an empirical claim. You should know what you are claiming and be able to back it up in a way that is not (essentially) “well, in 2010, no one cared about labubus.”

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Now I understand that this sort of post provokes a search of my own archives for “increasingly,” so I did that myself. Most of the uses of “increasingly” were either from quotes or from reviews where I was saying that X quality increases over the course of whatever I was talking about. Here are the two dubious instances I found:

• “Do We Need Another Twitter?”: “It made writing boring, especially culture writing, which was flattened out to cover three or four topics over and over from increasingly desperate angles.”

• “You Don’t Want To Date A Concept”: “Nevertheless, people love making posts like this. Women love posting stuff that’s like ‘fellas, what do you think’ or about their increasingly esoteric dealbreakers, and that is because you always get a reaction. Men love posting stuff like ‘WOMEN: MEN DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR JOB OR IF YOU CAN READ A MENU.’”

The second one is fine because it’s referring to a hypothetical woman whose dealbreakers are increasingly esoteric. The first one is bad and as punishment I would cut off a finger or something but that would make it hard to pet my dog so I won’t.

1. For my mother: a labubu is a doll.