Yeah it's an unfortunate, but well-known linguistic rule that superlatives get watered down over time. Thirty years ago, "awesome" described God and... not much else. Nowadays the Cheerios I had for breakfast can be awesome.
So where do we get more superlatives, when they're all ruined? We just make 'em up (e.g.
tressla).
It's easy to overuse pet words, my coworker across the hall used to (mis)use "literally" all the time. Drove me nuts. I do it too, though. I've been saying "vagaries" a lot lately.
My personal pet peeves are phrases that start in office culture, and escape into the wild:
"Reach out" (to describe any form of contact, for any purpose)
"Moving forward" and variants
etc.
I think there are some very interesting, major changes to the English language currently underway in society:
1) We are losing the plural form of "to be". The most common example is when someone says "There is [plural noun]" instead of "There are [plural noun]". (e.g.,
There's several things I want to talk about today...)This is ubiquitous, you'll hear it everywhere once you're aware of it.
I don't really mind the change. It's difficult to think so far ahead in your sentence, and it's easy to get into the habit of starting off with "There's..." and then the subject ends up being plural.
Spanish and German, for example, only have one expression for "There is/are" (i.e. "hay" and "es gibt"). It's much easier this way.
2) We're losing the plural forms where "f" changes to "v", e.g. knife/knives, life/lives, etc. I hear people say "knifes" and "lifes" all the time.
Anyway, my $.02.