Deft praise encourages others to feel as we do, share our enthusiasms. It rewards deserving objects of admiration. It persuades people to take certain actions. It sells things.
Sadly, in this "age of awesome," our words and phrases of acclaim are exhausted, all but impotent. Even so, we find ourselves defaulting to such habitual choices as "good," "great," and "terrific," or stock synonyms that tumble out of a thesaurus - "superb," "marvelous," "outstanding," and the like. The piling on of intensifers such as "totally" only makes matters worse, while negative modifiers ("incredible," "unreal") render our common parlance nearly tragic. Until now.