Don't Be Spooktacular This Halloween

Every year, just after school begins the temperature drops to let the trees know that it’s time to change colors. Getting into the car is enjoyable again, which is a stark contrast to a summer-long dread of the greenhouse effect. The nights become cool and crisp and you can see your breath in the light of the full moon. The leaves and the cornstalks become brittle and the crops must be gathered before the winter sets in. It’s autumn again, my favorite time of the year.

Historically a time of harvest and the last feasts before winter, we have adapted other traditions in our urban society, one of the most popular of which is Halloween. Despite its roots in witchcraft and black magic, modern commercialism has lassoed and made safe the enigma of the eerie for mainstream consumption by selling horror films and making it acceptable to play dress-up for a couple weeks of the year.

However, and quite ironically in view of the trend toward sterile and innocent fun on Halloween, there has arisen from the stew of costume parties and trick-or-treat events an evil perhaps greater than that of Halloween’s esoteric beginnings. I am speaking, of course, of “spooktacular”. This accursed hybridization of the words “spooky” and “spectacular” has been rearing its ugly head everywhere I turn! Even such once-revered organizations as Sea World and Hooters have thus signed their souls away in the name of cheap advertisement₁, and I will remain a bystander no longer. Indeed, there is much more that needs to be done than one blog post, but I hope and pray that mine will be a voice of clarity and serve as a rallying cry for those who have similarly descried the devious ways of “spooktacular”.

Throughout the eons, mankind has drawn humor from wordplay. Drawing connections between seemingly unrelated subjects through similarities in the words they are assigned by a language is as fundamentally funny as Larry poking Mo in the eyes. Throughout the ages, however, the two have stratified and been given the respective designations of “low” and “high” comedy. This stands in direct parallel to class stratification in this regard: the use of language associations is more burdensome on the brain and therefore a mastery of “the pun” designates schooling and a quick wit. In fact, the more exclusive the jargon that is utilized in the successful formation of a pun, the more pleasure the participants experience, due to the added sense of accomplishment and inclusion. It’s true that “nerd humor” is frowned upon occasionally in our culture, but I can’t help but ask, “by whom?” Almost from the point a newborn opens his eyes he laughs at slapstick, but puns referencing quantum physics can be generated and understood only after years of sophisticated education. It can thus be held as desirable to be able to participate in this level of discourse, and slightly callow to ridicule it.

“Spooktacular” unfortunately is the exact philosophical opposite. It goes against all of the progress humanity has made. Firstly, not only is it overused, but its continued use denotes a lack of imagination. This overuse bestows the term with a cloud of “Halloweenish” generality, and in effect taints the root words it has hijacked for its own base purposes. The word “spectacular”, for example evokes the feel of extreme goodness, particularly relating to the visual sense, e.g. its relation to the word “spectacle”. All of this wonderful connotation is lost in relation to its dastardly cousin, because there is no longer anything remarkable about a “spooktacular” gathering. “Halloween” is a concise and accurate enough modifier to describe any event that could ever be simultaneously dubbed “spooktacular”, and it lacks the contrived and (frankly) lame sense of humor.

It is a counterfeit pun at best to begin with and, while it once possibly caused laughter or a fleeting smile on the face of a passer-by, it at best is ignored by those who encounter it in light of the battery of Halloween-themed puns with which amateur advertisers inundate us during the month of October, and at worst serves only to darken the brow of the more enlightened shopper. So please, whether you are posting an event on Facebook or designing a billboard for a haunted house, have a little dignity and strike the word “spooktacular” from your vocabulary. Use other humorous devices to complement your summary. Your exceptionalism will not go overlooked by those of us who still care about the English language.

₁According to a Google Image search.