How awesome is awesome?

The answer, of course, depends on whether you interpret the question to be enquiring or rhetorical. More to the point, it depends on what you mean by awesome, and here we run into a spot of semantic sludge. Speaking to a friend on the phone last night, I used the word and found myself appending a parenthetical clarification: that I meant awe-inspiring. Because to many people in many contexts — especially young people in any context — the word awesome means pretty good, great, cool, excellent, fine, exciting, quite interesting, not terrible, etc. It is often preceded by totally, or followed by dude, or both; and new variations arise constantly.

My hiccups have stopped. That is so awesome!!1!
Is that a new pencil? It’s awesome, dude.
There’s, like, a free David Hasselhoff toaster with every new kitchen. That’s, like, totally awesome. It is teh awesomest.

This sense of awesome dates to 1961 and became popular a couple of decades later (more on that below). The original meaning of awesome, dating to around 1600, is “filled with awe, profoundly reverential”; by the end of that century it had come to mean “awe-inspiring”. The root word awe, meaning terror, dread, or wonder, is much older. There are situations where awesome is still implicitly and normally understood in this earlier sense, such as when used in religious commentary, or deployed by, say, a physicist when describing the power of the sun. But the weakened sense of the word has crowded the field.

The first time I remember using awesome was on a day in the bog in my early teens. We (assorted family members) were loading a truck with bags full of sods that were finally dry and ready to store. Helping us were two men I didn’t know, brothers in their late thirties or so. I was hefting bags from one pile to another nearer the truck, and from this vantage the men seemed immensely strong, even when I allowed for the physical disparity between the average adult and my non-Hulk-like teenaged self. One brother stood in the back of the truck while the other tossed bags of turf up to him with one hand — almost flicking them, as if they were no heavier than juggling bags. I turned to my father and said, “That’s awesome.” He laughed and agreed.

Occasionally I use awesome in its weakened, broad sense, and I see and hear this usage everywhere. Some people use it with irresistible enthusiasm. I would guess that its ubiquity has almost attained a level of colloquial penetration that cool did before it; at the risk of sounding facetious, its current popularity is awesome. Our generation is either in a state of near-perpetual awe, or in a state of a complete lack of awe. What’s more probable, and less tongue-in-cheek, is that the word’s meaning has simply devalued. And I mean no value judgement. It is arguably as pointless to bemoan a shift in lexical meaning as it is to gripe at the rising tide for turning your sandcastle into an amorphous lump.

[Image of Synchiropus splendidus by Luc Viatour. Because it is awesome, like this cat.]

A few examples, selected more or less at random from the British National Corpus, shows a wide range of usage, with landscapes, battles, sporting feats, and natural forces and sights appearing often:

Understanding of the atomic nucleus was progressing rapidly and awareness was dawning of the awesome energies latent within.
You’re an awesome dancer.
The SNES version of Star Wars looks being one of the most awesome treats of ‘93.
Certainly, multimedia systems can perform spectacular, even awesome feats.
[T]he famous charge of the Frankish knights with levelled lances was still an awesome and terrible thing to the lightly-armed Saracens
His batting could be awesome in its power.
High Elf mages are mighty spell casters whose fiery blasts and awesome energies have won many a battle.

The Urban Dictionary has, at the time of writing, 73 user-written definitions of awesome, the vast majority of which attribute to it the same generically positive meaning as cool, with an optional added oomph of awesomeness. Roughly seven entries include the sense of awe or allude to the traditional definition. The Urban Dictionary is a contemporary slang dictionary, so this ratio is unsurprising. Some of the entries are quite imaginative; others seem decidedly weary.

Film critic Roger Ebert tells us that the American teen comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) features Sean Penn immortalising the word awesome. I have not seen this film; for me it was Bill and Ted who popularised the slang usage. I don’t know when this happened relative to my awesome day in the bog, so I can’t say how established the word’s different connotations were at the time, but I have always been aware of using it in two distinct ways. These spheres of meaning overlap but are usefully distinguished — at least if we want to preserve the traditional meaning. (The Oxford English Dictionary includes a third meaning of awesome, from the late-sixteenth century: “filled with awe”, which discovery almost prompted me to title the post “I am awesome”, until I thought better of it.)

In the Columbia Guide to Standard American Usage, Kenneth G. Wilson writes that in the 1980s the word was “suddenly taken up as a hyperbolic adjective to describe anything better than average”. This seems a fair assessment. Wilson adds that awesome and awesomely “will no doubt one day be perfectly useful words again, but just now [1993] they are shopworn and weary”. A few years later, Bryan Garner wrote of awesome that “[f]or the time being, the word has been spoiled by overuse”. But these judgements should not dissuade you from using it as you see fit. Robert Burchfield, in his third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, reports that “[t]he traditional reverential use is far from extinct […] in the US, though it is more at risk there than in Britain.”

Awful is a related term, and its history is equally interesting and even more changeable, but this blog post is already long enough. I wrote a little about it here, if you’re curious. And if you’d like to share your thoughts below, that would be awesome.

Blather and blarney and blindfolding the devil

“All Ireland went into the making of this book,” the Sunday Tribune wrote of English As We Speak It In Ireland by Patrick Weston Joyce (1827-1914). An exaggeration, certainly, but a forgivable one when describing this wonderful, idiosyncratic collection of Irish-English sayings, proverbs, expressions, folklore, vocabulary and barely categorisable linguistic oddities. There are chapters on grammar, old customs, swearing, and proverbs; there is one devoted to exaggeration and redundancy; there is even a chapter exploring the expressions pertaining to the devil. As the title page declares: “The life of a people is pictured in their speech”.

This blog post is not a review of P. W. Joyce’s book, just a hearty endorsement. Such has been my pleasure as I read it over the last few days that I want to recommend it warmly to anyone listening – that is, reading – who has an interest in Ireland’s folk history or in the endlessly witty and strange innovations the English language underwent under the influence of the Irish tongue. Growing up in the rural west, I was exposed to all manner of colourful turns of phrase and modes of speech. Some I inherited and use to this day; others I lost along the way. Joyce’s book has reacquainted me with a few and introduced me to many others, as fresh today as they might have been a century or two ago.

Irish-English has a great many words and phrases used to describe a person’s lack of intelligence, decency, or industry; one of my favourites is: “There’s a great deal of sense outside your head.” Upon the approach of a conceited person – a pusthaghaun (m) or pusthoge (f) – you could say, with cheerful sarcasm, that here comes “half the town”, a translation of the Irish leath an bhaile /læh ən ‘wɒljə/ or /ljæh ən ‘wɒljə/. A useless fellow is “fit to mind mice at a cross-roads”. Contrary to Freud, a Munster saying insists that “a slip of the tongue is no fault of the mind”. Upon hearing of danger or tragedy, a person might exclaim: “The Lord between us and all harm!” A spaug (Irish: spág) is a big clumsy foot. I’ve heard these last two a lot.

You could say, of a very familiar person, that you’d know their shadow on a furze bush. If someone falls well short of an aim or target, they “didn’t come within the bray of an ass of it”. A version I’m more familiar with, especially in a sporting context, is that they didn’t come “within an ass’s roar” of something. Apparently the phrase harks back to ancient times, when sounds such as bells and animal noises were used as approximate measures of distance. The donkey also appears in a popular expression used of a garrulous person: they would “talk the jawbone off an ass” (or “the hind legs off a donkey”); English As We Speak It In Ireland cites an equivalent saying: that they would “talk the teeth off a saw”.

Hear ye this here: Hear! Hear!

The phrase hear! hear! originated as the imperative hear him! (hear him!) in the late seventeenth century, or possibly earlier. It became popular as a British parliamentary exclamation used to draw attention to something a speaker had just said. By the late eighteenth century an abridged version had developed: hear! or hear! hear! In its written form it is punctuated in various ways, e.g. hear, hear and hear hear!

Over time, the expression spread to other domains, such as meetings and local debates. These days it is often used online to signify agreement, in much the same way that “Seconded”, “What [x] said” and “+1” do. It can, however, be used to convey anything from enthusiastic approval to withering derision, depending on the tone and context of delivery. Deployed ironically, it would be similar to “Would you listen to that!” or “Get him/her!”, which in text form might require a sarcastic font to prevent literal interpretation.

Hear! Hear! is frequently written here! here! (or here, here!, etc.). In A Dictionary of True Etymologies, Adrian Room suggests that this may be as if to indicate “the person or place where there is approval (while also suggesting the almost synonymous ’same here!’)”. Another factor in the confusion may be the historical predominance of the phrase as a spoken expression rather than a written one. If Google hits are any indication, the erroneous rendering now seems more popular, and may ultimately become the normal or even standard form, through contagion and imitation.

Turning in the other temporal direction, the same expression – more or less – appears in the Bible, albeit in the slightly different sense of “Listen” or “Hear me”:

Then cried a wise woman out of the city, Hear, hear; say, I pray you, unto Jo’ab, Come near hither, that I may speak with thee.

A hear, hear or hear-hear is the noun describing the act of saying “hear! hear!”, while to hear-hear is the verb. A person who says “hear, hear!” can be described as a hear-hearer. If you have difficulty remembering whether it’s hear, hear! or here, here!, it might help to recall the origin of the phrase.

Don’t razz me, bro

Here is a short passage from Stuart Chase’s excellent 1938 book The Tyranny of Words, a layman’s introduction to semantics:

William of Occam (1300 A.D.) challenged the “absolutes” of the medieval philosophers. In a tactful way he razzed¹ the Schoolmen, holding that “absolutes” and “universals” were mental conveniences, and that God could not be proved by words. . . .
¹ A good example of a slang word created to fill a linguistic void.

Razz (v) is slang for heckle, tease, deride, criticise. It derives from razzberry, itself an informal variant of raspberry (the kind you blow, not eat). I have never used razz in this sense, and I have rarely if ever heard it spoken. So when I read Chase’s book, the word was immediately conspicuous, and not just because it directed my gaze to a footnote. In a pre-WWII book about the meanings of words, the self-conscious use of a (mostly North American?) slang word was bound to stand out. This is especially so since the use of that word remains quite limited, at least from this amateur linguist’s position at the elbow of Europe some decades later.

Chase’s decision to include it made me wonder about (though not doubt) the linguistic void razz was purported to fill. Voltaire’s description of the superfluous as “a very necessary thing” seems apt to slang; Chase’s razzed could be replaced with ribbed or ragged without losing substantial sense, but each term delivers unique nuances and subtleties. Needle and badger inhabit similar semantic spaces, but they are less colloquial and seem to connote a harshness missing from razz’s playful heckling.

No doubt Chase chose the term carefully, but its relative obscurity shows a shortcoming of putting slang to work beyond its natural terrain: readers (or listeners) may have to pause to parse the phrase or even delve into a dictionary.

The title of this blog post, by the way, is a play on this phrase.

[image source]

“Attacks” on the language are greatly misunderstood

Last Thursday’s edition of the Irish Times included an opinion piece about the English Language. When I saw the title (“Attacks on the language are rising, basically”) I wondered what the author, David Adams, might be referring to. Was his article a damning assessment of funding for education? A protest at misplaced apostrophes, those errant marks whose ubiquity some would have you believe portends an imminent apostrophopocalypse? A penetrating analysis of contemporary Newspeak, Doublethink, and political framing, such as the redefinition of “war”?

No: Mr Adams spends almost half the article complaining about people using the word “basically” too much, while the rest is a scattershot rant about the nouning of verbs, Australian intonation, and assorted fads and verbal ticks that annoy him. He makes a reasonable point or two near the end, but along the way he takes tiresome potshots at the “blogosphere” (his scare quotes) in “cyberspace” (mine), where “words are regularly invented, mangled or forced against their will from nouns into verbs, or vice versa” (about which more below). He concludes by having another go at “basically”. His barely suppressed rage at the utterance of this word is more than a little alarming:

Only good manners and not wanting to be thought a complete lunatic stop some of us from screaming: “There is no ‘basically’ about it. . . .”

Unwilling to suppress my own more temperate feelings about the matter, I emailed a response to the Irish Times, reprinted below. My letter (which is rather long, but a lot shorter than it was originally) does not appear in today’s Times, though there is one short letter congratulating Mr Adams “for highlighting the abuse of ‘basically’”. At this point I would like to refer all interested parties to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage,* whose entry on “basically” includes the level-headed point that “the rigorous pursuit of excising ‘basically’ does not look like an important path to better prose”.

* Freely available in the dreaded “cyberspace” or from any good bookshop.

Orient or orientate? Either, but…

…be aware that some consider orientate non-standard in U.S. English.

Orient (v) and orientate are all but interchangeable. Even the OED entry for orientate is “=orient”. Both words have a literal meaning: “position or align to face east or, by extension, in any specified direction or relative to some other defined data; or ascertain the bearings of”; and a figurative meaning: “bring into a defined relationship to known facts or principles”. There are also technical meanings which have to do with molecular and sub-molecular alignment.

History orients us to the present
In the thick fog, only sounds helped him orientate himself
They began to orient to their new environment
Plant leaves and stems orientate themselves towards the light
If the bee orients her waggle* 90° to the left of vertical… (Mark Ridley, Animal Behaviour)
Pressures on management are orientated towards shareholder rather than employee welfare (JE Parkinson, Corporate Power and Responsibility)

* So far, my favourite phrase of the week.

The shorter verb dates from 1727, the longer from 1849, when it was printed in the very same journal that seems to have introduced orientation, from which orientate may have been back-formed. Or maybe not. Since then orientate has been used by writers such as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Mead, Tennessee Williams, and Randolph Quirk, but this has not prevented it from being criticised.

Bryan Garner calls it a “needless variant”. Other sources are more disparaging still. But Robert Burchfield, after describing the words’ parallel development towards what became in the late 20C a “competition” and a “contest”, tolerantly concludes that “one can have no fundamental quarrel with anyone who decides to use the longer of the two words”. In other words, it is perfectly standard – at least in British English.

[Image: a bee's waggle dance, which helps them collectively orient(ate) themselves towards floral cues.]

But as Kenneth G. Wilson writes in the Columbia Guide to Standard American English:

American commentators continue to object to orientate (used more frequently by the British), mainly because orient is shorter but also because the figurative use is outstripping the literal one.

Ernest Gowers anticipated this when, in the revised second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, he wrote that orientate “seems likely to prevail in the common figurative use”, while in The Complete Plain Words he remarked that the figurative use was “passing all reasonable bounds”. The subjects of his scorn – a “client-orientated” service, a “purpose-oriented” building – are of a type that is even more common today.

Both words are often used – and often interchangeably – as participial adjectives (oriented and orientated). Burchfield cites the OED’s examples of each being preceded by adverbs:

environmentally oriented
psychologically oriented
vertically oriented
politically orientated

and by nouns:

adult-oriented
art-oriented
performance-oriented or -orientated
user-oriented or -orientated
degree-orientated

For a fuller flavour, have a rummage through the British and American corpora. (Some of these listings are of course past tenses rather than participial adjectives.)

The antonyms disorient and disorientate date from 1655 and 1704, respectively; again they are virtually synonymous. The OED states that while both can mean “cause (a person) to lose his or her sense of direction; make confused as to what is true or correct”, the longer verb can also mean “turn from the East, give an alignment other than eastern; change or vary the alignment of”.

But in most cases this slight differentiation seems likely to be increasingly eroded, if the development of orient and orientate is anything to go by. Some decades ago, Eric Partridge noted in Usage and Abusage that orientate is correct as an intransitive (“to face in a particular direction”), but that orient is preferable in all other senses. It may now be too late for such a distinction, though, if it was ever valid in the first place.

No discernible circumference

Earlier this year there was a minor media flurry about the English language supposedly attaining its millionth word. This (non-)event, which was dragged out for a few years, was such raiméis that I decided not to write about it at all, apart from a curt dismissal on Twitter. However, it did serve some useful purposes. For one thing, it prompted many interested parties – amateurs and academics alike – to write thoughtful criticisms. It got people writing, talking, and thinking about language. It also showed the extent of credulity or cynicism, or both, in many commercial news organisations. Shocking, I know.

I could get carried away posting hyperlinks to worthwhile criticisms of the project (or ‘publicity stunt’, if you prefer), but out of mercy for my readers I’ll limit the links to a handful, each of which I heartily recommend: Ben Zimmer, Jesse Sheidlower, Grant Barrett, Michael Covarrubias, and David Crystal, whose post attracted a response from the man behind the millionth-word shenanigans. Language Log, an outstanding linguistics blog, covered the pseudo-event in considerable detail. To one of those posts, written by Zimmer, I added a comment with an excerpt from James A. H. Murray’s introduction to the first volume of the original Oxford English Dictionary. The main purpose of this post is to repeat that excerpt here on Sentence first.

Before that, though, a few words about Murray (pictured, in his Scriptorium). It is possible that no one else could have done the job he did; it is almost certain that no one could have done it so well and with such commitment to quality over haste. He embodied a rare combination of knowledge, ability, temperament and dedication that made him ideal for the job, though over its many years he had more than occasional cause to doubt his suitability for it and the probability of its eventual completion.

As well as being as great lexicographer, Murray was a polymath whose keen interests included astronomy, botany, archaeology, mathematics and geology. These interests prepared him well for the decades he spent working on the OED. They gave him expertise in a wide range of subjects, which enabled him to draw useful analogies between different disciplines. This is beautifully apparent in the excerpt below. As his granddaughter K. M. Elisabeth Murray wrote in Caught in the Web of Words, “because he never compartmentalised his interests, he never missed seeing something because he had allowed himself to become preoccupied with another line of research.”

Here is Murray’s own diagram of the structure of the English vocabulary, followed by his exceptionally lucid explanation of it. (I will remove any or all of the following material for copyright reasons if requested to do so on behalf of the OED.)

The centre is occupied by the ‘common’ words, in which literary and colloquial usage meet. ‘Scientific’ and ‘foreign’ words enter the common language mainly through literature; ’slang’ words ascend through colloquial use; the ‘technical’ terms of crafts and processes, and the ‘dialect’ words, blend with the common language both in speech and literature. Slang also touches on one side of the technical terminology of trades and occupations, as in ‘nautical slang’, ‘Public School slang’, ‘the slang of the Stock Exchange’, and on another passes into true dialect. Dialects similarly pass into foreign languages. Scientific terminology passes on one side into purely foreign words, on another it blends with the technical vocabulary of art and manufactures. It is not possible to fix the point at which the ‘English Language’ stops, along any of these diverging lines.

And:

The Vocabulary of a widely-diffused and highly-cultivated living language is not a fixed quantity circumscribed by definite limits. That vast aggregate of words and phrases which constitutes the Vocabulary of English-speaking men presents, to the mind that endeavours to grasp it as a definite whole, the aspect of one of those nebulous masses familiar to the astronomer, in which a clear and unmistakable nucleus shades off on all sides, through zones of decreasing brightness, to a dim marginal film that seems to end nowhere, but to lose itself imperceptibly in the surrounding darkness. In its constitution it may be compared to one of those natural groups of the zoologist or botanist, wherein typical species forming the characteristic nucleus of the order, are linked on every side to other species, in which the typical character is less and less distinctly apparent, till it fades away in an outer fringe of aberrant forms, which merge imperceptibly in various surrounding orders, and whose own position is ambiguous and uncertain. For the convenience of classification, the naturalist may draw the line, which bounds a class or order, outside or inside of a particular form; but Nature has drawn it nowhere. So the English Vocabulary contains a nucleus or central mass of many thousand words whose ‘Anglicity’ is unquestioned; some of them only literary, some of them only colloquial, the great majority at once literary and colloquial,- they are the Common Words of the language. But they are linked on every side with other words which are less and less entitled to this appellation, and which pertain ever more and more distinctly to the domain of local dialect, of the slang and cant of ’sets’ and classes, of the peculiar technicalities of trades and processes, of the scientific terminology common to all civilized nations, of the actual languages of other lands and peoples. And there is absolutely no defining line in any direction: the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference.