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R.I.P. to the understatement. Welcome to death by Internet hyperbole, the latest example of the overly dramatic, forcibly emotive, truncated, simplistic and frequently absurd ways chosen to express emotion in the Internet age (or sometimes feign it). The trend toward hyperbole appears to echo a broader belief among experts that young women are its first adopters. One explanation for the use of hyperbole (OMG!) With the increase in digital, vs. face to face communication, we must come up with increasingly creative ways to express tone and emphasis when facial cues are not an option. There's a performative element to our social media interactions, too: We are expressing things with an audience in mind. Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguist and founder of Idibon, a company that uses computer data to analyze language, notes "Performance generally requires the performer to be interesting. So do likes, comments and reshares. Exaggeration is one way to do that."

The text exchange was unspectacular: a friend explaining a video that had been posted by a classmate to his Snapchat feed. Jordana Narin, my 20-year-old research assistant, was half paying attention, sitting in my living room working on a project, texting between breaks. "Omg literally dying," she typed back, not missing a beat.

Jennifer Sclafani, a linguist at Georgetown University, recently wrote a book set to publish this fall titled "Talking Donald Trump: A Sociolinguistic Study of Style, Metadiscourse, and Political Identity." Sclafani notes Trump has used language to "create a brand" as a politician. "President Trump creates a spectacle in the way that he speaks," she said. "So it creates a feeling of strength for the nation, or it creates a sense of determination, a sense that he can get the job done through his use of hyperbole and directness." The features of Trump's speech patterns include a casual tone, a simple vocabulary and grammar, frequent 2 word utterances, repetitions, hyperbole and sudden switches of topics, according to Sclafani. Trump also sets himself apart by the words he doesn't use. For example, he started his sentences with "well" less frequently than other Republican contenders during the 2016 GOP primary debates. Omitting the word "well" at the start of a sentence helped Trump come across as a straight talker who wouldn't try to escape a question asked by a moderator, Sclafani said.

Jennifer Sclafani, an associate teaching professor in Georgetown University's Department of Linguistics, has been studying the way Trump speaks. She notes that the way Trump speaks, he speaks was a commoner rather than a president, who is usually someone that sounds more educated, and more refined than an average American. She has noticed that through hyperboles and directness from his words, he creates a feeling of strength and determination that he can get the job done. Trump also omits the word "well" which makes him come across as a straight talker and not someone that tries to escape a question.

My colleague Yunus Peer recommended this BBC video about the recent cultural trend of "linguistic supersizing"--the frequent use of hyperbole, extreme exaggeration. Pure genius!

"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it," Jonathan Swift once wrote. It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study produced by MIT and published Thursday in Science. The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter's existence-some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years-and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. "It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information," said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. "And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature."