![]() ![]() "For example, sticklers will likely carp about impoverishment of vocabulary and semantic drift, awesome in the 'enthusiastic approval generally' sense having little or nothing to do with awe (just as they would previously have objected to terrible for its attenuated connection to terror). "Acceptance or rejection of group identity sharpens the reactions. Scorners resist awesome because they do not care to sound like those people. Adopters hear other people using awesome to indicate enthusiastic approval generally and pick it up because it gives them a sense of solidarity and group identity. ![]() " Vogue words like awesome catch on because everyone is using them, and they irritate because everyone is using them. (Dan Lyons, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble. That's awesome! You're awesome! No, you're awesome for saying that I'm awesome!" ![]() They use the word awesome incessantly, usually to describe themselves or each other. I'm equally amazed by the high regard in which HubSpot people hold themselves. "I'm just amazed that hundreds of people can gobble up this malarkey and repeat it, with straight faces. (Arthur Plotnik, Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives. 'The fries were industrial-strength awesome.' 'The ride was shiver-me-timbers awesome.'" But because awesome is so worn out, the exaggeration doesn't register it needs an element of novelty to help it to do so. A pile of french fries hardly makes us tremble in awe, yet we call it awesome, exaggerating for the sake of persuasion. "In a world of sensory overload, most terms of acclaim are exaggerations. (Elizabeth Strong-Cuevas, quoted by Lewis Burke Frumkes in Favorite Words of Famous People. ![]() Saying the word, the mouth opens in speechless delight before that which is greater than the self." "'Awe,' to be used on rare occasions before the marvelous, the extraordinary. 'Awesome,' a tiresome word, flung indiscriminately in all directions, on all occasions until it has become so trivial, it is valueless. "'Awe,' a word we are about to lose, that has been robbed of its meaning by the unfortunate adjective 'awesome.' "Awe' meaning ecstatic, reverential feeling before Beauty, before the Magnificent.
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