What's up with 'It's genius!'?

Is that expression stupid or am I missing something?

Photo by Taton Moïse on Unsplash

We all have our language peeves. Here’s what happened when I looked into one of mine.

Something that has bugged me since the first time I saw it, a while ago, is “It’s genius,” usually followed by an exclamation point. You’ve seen those ads too: “If you want to lose weight, rub this on your elbows before you go to bed. It’s genius!” That kind of thing — and never mind that what such text is recommending is almost always idiotic.

Steeped in grammar as I am, my first, scornful thought about that wording was that genius is a noun, not an adjective — as it would have to be in “It’s genius,” which is parallel to “It’s brilliant” and quite different from “She’s a genius.”

But a lot of nouns can be commandeered to serve as adjectives — like dance in dance party and animal in animal farm. (As such, they’re called “attributive nouns.”) Dance party and animal farm sound normal to me, though, whereas “It’s genius” does not.

A takeaway from my highly superficial knowledge of linguistics is that if something sounds normal to a native speaker, it’s probably safe to consider it “good” English; if it doesn’t, it isn’t. (That’s why we all accept “ungrammatical” constructions like “It’s me” and “Who do you trust?”)

So I was gratified to see that although genius, adj., appears in both Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary, M-W calls it “informal” and the OED deems it “colloquial.” That is, neither dictionary considers the usage ready to be turned loose in standard English.

Granted, the OED tells us this colloquial usage has been with us for a hundred years. In 1924, a character named Miss Phelps cried out, “Oh, but that's great, that's genius,” in the novel “There Is Confusion” by Harlem Renaissance luminary J.R. Fauset.

No doubt it was just the thing for Miss Phelps to say in that context — but what about today’s ads? If I don’t care to see “It’s genius” in them, what would I suggest as an improvement? That’s where polishing prose until it gleams gets difficult. MS Word’s thesaurus is no help: It only provides synonyms for the noun, dividing them up into the categories mastermind and brilliance.

All right, then, let’s see what the thesaurus has for the adjective brilliant. The meaning of brilliant itself comes close to what we want — but “Rub this on your elbows. It’s brilliant!” sounds stupid in a whole new way, no? The categories under brilliant are excellent, luminous, talented, and glorious — which suggests to me that we don’t quite have a standard English equivalent for genius, adjective.

So, reluctantly, I stand down. The ads I’m talking about don’t need to be in English to warm the heart of a grammarian, and most of them are small, where there probably isn’t space for a wordier construction like “Watch what happens!” “You won’t believe it!” or “You’ll see amazing results!”

Genius, adjective, may be an upstart compared with the noun, which has been with us since the 1300s. All the same, the adjective has a century-long track record and a respectable past, it’s clear as a bell, and it’s not trying to, um, elbow an existing word aside. The thing to remember when you’re trying to come up with a better word in a given context is that if you’re not careful, you can easily come up with a worse one. Sometimes the wise choice is to leave well enough alone.

Email me with your language questions, peeves, problems, etc., at barbaraswordshop@gmail.com, and I’ll respond as soon as I can. Correspondence may be edited. If you subscribe to The Boston Globe, look for my column, “May I Have a Word,” in the Ideas section every other Sunday.