Awesome
Awesome
didn’t always have such a carefree connotation, it dates all the way back to
the English versions of the bible. Psalms mentioned “the great and awesome
God”. However the King James Bible which was published in 1611 doesn’t use the
word ‘awesome’ to refer to God but instead the word ‘terrible’ is used, this
changed for modern translations of the bible as they wouldn’t have referred to
God in such a way.
The
word then appeared in the Oxford dictionary in 1598 and was used to describe
the feeling of ‘awe’, the phrase to be “filled with awe” actually meant: to be
filled with the feeling of dread or fear. It was closely associated with the
word ‘awful’ which actually had positive connotations unlike today where it is
used as a negative. They both originally started off by meaning “awe-inspiring”
, but then the word awesome stepped in
to take the positive connotations of the word whilst awful was becoming more
negative.
‘Awesome’
was constructed from ‘awe’ and ‘- ful’ as well as ‘some’. However the suffix of ‘some’ doesn’t mean to
have a quantity of something but for the having the quality of something.
I
looked at Fairclough’s Informatlization to
look at how words have become more or less formal and from what I can find I think
that the word awesome has got less formal. When I think of the word it makes me
think of American/ Australian surfers saying “that’s totally awesome dude”
therefore it is more than likely that this word has undergone Americanization
or American English as it is a word that Americans use more than English.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2733912/No-longer-marvellous-awesome-Britons-using-American-words-traditional-English-decline.htmlhttp://english.stackexchange.com/questions/6802/awesome-vs-awful
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