Literally. It ran low and dark, a valley plunged deep between two of our highest peaks. I could hardly get out of bed, the prospects of 24 hours of real down time weighing heavily.

Of course, what did I expect? Monday was sandwiched between a couple of our most famous Supers.

And, in this country, if "super" is attached well, it doesn't get any better.

Consequently, the word has found favor in a number of venues even without its metrical partner, duper.

So we have Super Bowls, Super Tuesdays and consider ourselves a super power.

We marvel at supercomputers, shop at supermarkets, read Freud to understand the superego and make movies about Superman and other super heroes.

Lots of dough? You're super rich. Big ol' squirt gun? Super Soaker. Want more fries? Supersize it. Poison in the water? Superfund site. Bad, bad boy movie? "Superbad." Rick James' big hit? "Super Freak."

We used to fly in supersonic jets and make Super 8 mm home movies. We still watch games in the Superdome, cheer skiers on the Super G, shop in superstores and try to spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

We were content with Elmer's or epoxy before somebody decided to put cyanoacrylate in a tube and call it Super Glue.

And today, Super Tuesday, many will be watching super delegates.

That's just super.

Granted, "super" has some traditional lexigraphical chops as a prefix meaning above or higher, such as in superintendent, supersede and supernumerary.

The road from the dictionary to Super Mario Brothers, however, is no information superhighway.

Peerless Tuesday

Instead, we tend to take the super off-ramp whenever we want to enlarge the size or importance of an event or object.

According to my friend Peter Roget, whoever named the football game and the passel of presidential primaries taking place Tuesday could have also considered "ace, bad (the slangy version), best kind, beyond compare, boss, capital, champion, chief, choicest, cool, crowing, culminating, finest, first, first-class, first-rate, foremost, greatest, highest, incomparable, inimitable, leading, matchless, nonpareil, number one, optimum, outstanding, paramount, peerless, perfect, pre-eminent, premium, prime, primo, principal, sans pareil, superlative, supreme, terrific, tops, tough, transcendent, unequaled, unparalleled, unrivaled."

Imagine watching Incomparable Bowl XVII or voting in a primary on Peerless Tuesday.

Shortly after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, I read an essay about what were the proper words and phrases to convey such an extraordinary event. (Extraordinary doesn't cut it, either.) The writer's point was that we had used and misused all the superlatives that came to mind when a human took a lunar stroll. Nothing captured the excuse me out-of-this-world moment.

I wonder if we are headed in the same direction with super, running the risk of losing its superior strength, its wont to enlarge, increase, empower and intensify.

After all, just using the objects on my desk, I could create an inventory of importance: the Super Stapler, the Hand Sanitizer Super Squirter, the Super Scratch Paper Pad and the all-new, smarter-than-a-fifth-grader Super Phone.

Unique numbers

I'm almost afraid to wake up Wednesday, which, to my knowledge, will be simply Feb. 6, 2008, a unique assemblage of numbers but apparently without a momentous appellation, a designation that makes it just a little better than Thursday.

Actually, two Supers in one week is plenty. The Super Bowl turned out to be just that, and Tuesday's 22-state political throwdowns have the look of a pivotal moment in the race for the White House.

Meanwhile, we need to be careful with the word. We can't expect it to carry the ball for us when we use it to describe everything from our most cherished sporting event to a pair of tube socks.

Keep that in mind the next time you want to make something "super."

After all, nothing is wrong with keen, magnificent, marvelous, outstanding, sensational, smashing, superb, topnotch and wonderful. Try one.

That would be super.