Locker room, Big Buddies and fatigue
‘So tired it’s out of tired’s word-range,’ Pemulis says. ‘Tired just doesn’t do it.’ ‘Exhausted, shot, depleted,’ says Jim Struck, grinding at his closed eye with the heel of his hand. ‘Cashed. Totalled.’ […] ‘Wrung dry. Whacked. Tuckered out. More dead than alive.’ ‘None even come close, the words.’ ‘Word-inflation,’ Stice says, rubbing at his crewcut so his forehead wrinkles and clears. ‘Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation.’
Context
The setup for the spine's inflation-generative-grammar riff: the boys inventory the entire synonym-set for tired and find the lexicon insufficient to the referent — "None even come close, the words." Stice's diagnosis is a full folk theory of semantic drift: word-inflation, superlatives devaluing like currency. Exhausted teenagers doing descriptive linguistics on their own suffering, in Avril's prescriptive house.