Thing. Ever. You’ve probably seen or heard someone say that, usually in a half-facetious, half-hyperbolic sense. (Or because you’ve watched the Simpsons and know who the Comic Book Guy, originator of the line, is.) When (real) people use that phrase, isolated as three individual pseudo-sentences for effect, they’re not talking about actual terrible things like famine, the plague, or the Nazis. They’re talking about the minor inconveniences that bother us in an amount disproportional to the actual harm we suffer. A quick search of Twitter elicits things like “not having somewhere to park my car,” “chapped lips,” and “having short hair on rainy days” as examples of things that were considered the “worst thing ever” by the Tweeter in question. Here’s another one: waiting. Waiting is a particularly fiendish terror, which evokes the hyperbole just mentioned. People bemoan having to visit the Department of Motor Vehicles, grumble when YouTube videos take more than a half-second to load, and, as some airport executives in Houston learned, complain when it takes too long for their bags to come.
