Overuse
How did it happen entirely under my nose? The word ‘awesome’ has become the primary positive adjective of now, with everyone (except me) using it to describe everything and everyone, and advertising agencies picking up on this and incorporating the term in stupid ways. Let’s see what it means:
- Causing awe or terror; inspiring wonder or excitement.
- (informal) Excellent, exciting, remarkable.
(source: Wiktionary)
The second item here is the current use of the word that I am discussing here, and the first is something altogether more elegant; after all, ‘awe’ is part of ‘awesome’. I’m not convinced these two definitions can co-exist. While the term ‘cool’ is used as a general positive adjective and is also used to describe someone who follows the trends of the day (a cool dude, who might say ‘awesome’ a lot), it doesn’t have this problem: the two meanings are distinguished between by context. But that doesn’t happen with ‘awesome’, because the two meanings above are of different degree but are on the same scale, so they are used in the same context – they both say something is good, but one says it is more good than the other does. So we end up with a dichotomy of people who use the word according to the old meaning, and another bunch of people who have converted it to the new one, and this is clearly not a good situation to be in.
The response might be that the new meaning is the one we should adopt as it is an example of language evolving. But this is a ridiculous evolution. There are a thousand positive adjectives we can use (and variety is good) and ‘awesome’ is a great word to use when describing awe, and I for one don’t want to lose that capability. And lose it we are doing: the word is genuinely losing its original meaning in my head as my friends bombard me with it to describe most of their exploits. Stop, please. I don’t believe you that the latest shooter is awesome, and if you keep saying it is, it’s not going to be saying very much when you tell me that algebraic geometry is awesome, when the latter genuinely does inspires awe.
Edit: I know I am guilty of having done the same thing with ‘epic’. But I feel I’ve learnt from that, so, inb4epic…