Laying it on thick

IN an Internet report I read recently, the writer exclaimed that “close to a staggering 7,500 comments can be found at the end of this post alone”. And in a car ad I saw recently, the model in question was described as the “World’s Most Advanced Car”. Hyperbole, or extravagant exaggeration, is the order of the day in the examples above.

If 7,500 comments are staggering, what adjective is the writer going to use when there are 15,000 comments or even more in a future article? In my vocabulary, no word can really exceed staggering, not even mind-boggling, so the writer is guilty of hyperbole.