aurora borealis from space: "awesome"




Current usage of the word "awesome" on the Internet sounds a bit odd to my ears. This is a picture of an awesome phenomenon; a photo of someone's cat on Flickr, say, is NOT awesome, though it might be "quite good", "cute" or even "not bad", I would say. (But then, who am I to say what's right? Prescriptive grammar was buried with Fowler, unless you're a Daily Telegraph reader.)

It's quite interesting, something you can actually follow happening linguistically. It's a bit like "bad" (meaning "good"), which came from AAVE. It was gradually replaced by the (initially) stronger "wicked", which has since come to mean little more than "nice" now.

Heigh ho.

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