A specific adverb has become superpopular in the last few decades, its spoken and written use rising at such a superfast clip that, if you’re inclined to verbal curmudgeonliness, it can be superirritating.

“Super” (from the same word in Latin, meaning above, over or beyond) has been around as an adjective and noun since the mid-19th century and as a prefix long before that. Shakespeare even got into the compound mix, noted Patricia T. O’Conner, an author of several books on language, with “my super-dainty Kate” in “The Taming of the Shrew.” But it has been in use as a stand-alone adverb — as a synonym for very or extremely — since only 1946, according to Merriam-Webster.

Data confirms the meteoric ascent of super. In a 2015 essay for the digital magazine OZY advocating the word’s abolition, the writer Pooja Bhatia cited statistics from the Corpus of Contemporary English indicating that super followed by an adjective — in other words, in adverbial form — was more than five times as common from 2010 to ’12 as from 1990 to ’94, with the biggest leaps coming in the last decade. To track one case, super nice barely registers on a Google Books Ngram search until 1969, spiking upward after 1984 and soaring even higher since 1997. (For comparison’s sake, very nice and quite nice have much more level climbs, though they still outpace their super sibling in total usage. George H. W. Bush’s desire for “a kinder and gentler” nation seems to have panned out nicely.)

As an adjectival synonym for excellent (“He’s a super guy”), super’s slang usage was generalized in 1895 and revived in 1967, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary (three years after “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” was popularized, at least among small fry, by “Mary Poppins”). As with awesome and amazing, however, its ubiquity has led to diminishing returns on its significance. What was once reserved for the best, the most awe-inspiring and the wondrous is now routinely deployed for the mundane, the banal and the taste of fro-yo. (Then there are modifications such as awesomesauce and amazeballs, the addition of sauce and balls evidently increasing the appeal.) The hyperbole is understandable. When your dining companion boasts about how “incredible” (primary definition: “too extraordinary and improbable to be believed”) his entirely plausible pad Thai is, you may feel compelled to join in the superlatives arms race and say the same about your entree.