National Geographic - Slang Hunters - It's Awesome
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crUaeZ7K4TQ
Awesome means like the best ever.
Everybody says awesome.
When something really cool happens. That was awesome.
Awesome! Just the best! There’s nothing better than awesome!
The best thing! The best thing that can ever be is awesome.
Awesome is a nice example of the journey a word can take.
Around 800 A.D., the Vikings rolled up on the shores of Britain bringing with them the word “Oege”, meaning fear. After a little pillaging, the Vikings split but the British kept the word, and change the pronunciation to “awe”. In time, “awe” introduced two new words, “awful” and “awesome”. For hundreds of years the two words were tied, sharing basically the same meaning and it wasn’t good.
Awesome started have meaning that kind of inspiring terror and trembling and so forth.
It is kind of like awesome like the
Dread Lord kind of awesome? That drives you insane of how terrifying and incomprehensible it is?
Actually, yea! But in the early 1800s, the pair parted ways. And also, began its journey to the slang superstardom.
One of the thing slang does, one of the playful things it does, is takes words that have a negative meaning or a neutral meaning and make them good. And so you see that with
"bad" coming to mean good, or "awesome" coming to mean something that is great.
In 1980, awesome officially hit the slang big time when it showed up in the best-selling Preppy Handbook, and it’s been a crowd favourite ever since. Even if like most styles, it suffers from a bit of over-exposure.
Nowadays, anything’s awesome.
That was awesome.
I’ll use it for nearly anything.
How you doing? Awesome.
I did my laundry today, awesome!
I found a quarter, awesome!
Walk my dog for a month, awesome!
The word “awesome” is supposed to mean something like incredible, like ‘oh I just had a child, that’s awesome!’, like ‘The creation of the Earth is awesome!’
Nowadays it’s overused.
People just like ‘Oh I’ve just folded up a napkin and threw it into the barrel, aren’t I awesome?’ No, you’re not awesome.
Umm, awesome. Awesome is awesome.