At its earliest recorded usage in the late 16th Century, the word “awesome” implied an experience that filled one with a profoundly reverential or dread-filled awe. The word “awe” itself comes from the Old Norse agi, meaning terror, and found its common sense of dread mixed with veneration when applied to the Old Testament God, yet only made its way toward awesome through the more terrifying side of the word awful. In his 1923 book, The Idea of the Holy, Rudolf Otto attempted to describe the feeling of religious experiences, that is, the encounter of humans with the most gripping and inapprehensible face of reality, which he characterized as mysterium tremendum, mysteriously tremendous. Such experiences are fascinating, unknowable, wholly other, and vast or larger than us enough to set us trembling in fright, that is, they are truly awesome.
Over time, which always changes things, the meaning of awesome began to weaken, by the 1960s suggesting only that its referent is staggering or overwhelming. Due in part to its usage by surfers to describe hard to ride waves, awesome soon flooded the American vocabulary, along with words like radical, as a term of trivial commendation. “Dude, that’s awesome” no longer pointed to truly awe-inspiring experiences, but could be applied with as ready ease to an enjoyment of the latest pop-cultural products. A Google image search for awesome brings up images of winking dogs and bong-smoking dolphin tattoos for instance. According to the Urban Dictionary, awesome is now: “something Americans use to describe everything,” a definition as vague and ineffective as its usage.
Language changes, meanings corrupt and mutate, and though some might long for a linguistic integrity it is perhaps not possible to return to earlier usages of words (though their meanings might change and become more apt again). We are stuck for now with the diminished awesome. But there is significance to this, which speaks to the contemporary experience of the world. What we say and how we say it shapes how we think, which in turn shapes our perceptions, beliefs, and actions. The decline of the word awesome suggests to me that culturally we are no longer able to feel the mysterium tremendum, that truly terrifying and reverential attitude to reality as something larger than ourselves. We no longer tremble in the face of our experiences. This is not surprising in an age where more and more people cease to believe in god(s), the feelings such deities evoke is dying along with them, regardless of if that god was in heaven or in a thunderstorm.
That last may help explain this linguistic shift. Beyond religious experiences, I suspect the other most common use of the old sense of awesome was in relation to the fierceness and majesty of the natural world. I easily imagine Lord Byron standing on a cliff, poetically describing some wrathful tempest as awesome. Even the surfers seemed to realize that sense of nature as terrifying and larger than us; the most awesome waves were the ones that could kill you. But there has been no longer such reverence and fear of nature, as civilization continues its move into ever more urban and technologically controlled spaces. We see the world through windows and screens, and are barely effected by the forces of nature beyond the snow being obnoxious to get to work through. But when we are effected, as one has to be in an age now seeing more hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, which must surely evoke the old awe and terror, it is very unlikely that these events would be described as awesome. What happened in Haiti is awesome in the truest sense of the word, yet reading that statement out of context might imply that I vaguely enjoyed it, in the same way one might enjoy an “awesome” music video.
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