THE RISE OF "AWESOME"

Once it had to do with awe. Now it just means "great". How did "awesome" conquer the world? Robert Lane Greene explains (and reminisces) ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September/October 2011

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In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was awesome.

If this sounds like an irreverent approach to the famous first lines of the gospel of John, I can assure you it’s not. “The word was God,” according to the original. But repeatedly in the Bible, God is “awesome”. Nehemiah, Deuteronomy and the Psalms refer to “the great and awesome God”, “mighty and awesome”, and ask worshippers to praise his “great and awesome name”. How did this once-awe-inspiring word become a nearly meaningless bit of verbiage referring to anything even mildly good?

The first time “awesome” appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1598, it was a description for someone feeling awe, rather than someone inspiring it. But it wasn’t too long before the now-traditional meaning made its first recorded appearance: “A sight of his cross”, wrote a Scottish Presbyterian sermoniser in 1664, “is more awsom than the weight of it.”

The King James Bible, published in 1611, does not use “awesome”: God is “terrible” in the passages above. This makes sense, since as Proverbs tells us, “fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and in those days “terrible” still had a strong connection to “terror”. But over the centuries, “terrible” picked up its now-common meaning, first of “shockingly bad”, and by the early 20th century, just plain “bad”. In modern translations of the Bible, it wouldn’t do to have God described that way. So “awesome” stepped in.

But around the same time, a different change was happening to “awesome”. It was defined in 1980 in the “Official Preppy Handbook”, a bestselling semi-satirical look at well-heeled American youth: “Awesome: terrific, great.” It had a bit of California surfer-dude and Valley Girl, too. By 1982, the Guardian was mocking the West Coast with “It’s so awesome, I mean, fer shurr, toadly, toe-dully!”

Soon the word needed no definition. “Awesome” became the default descriptor for anything good. In 1982, I was seven and I swallowed it whole. It stayed with me for decades. In 2005, I remember meeting a girl when I had just seen “Batman Begins”, the moody psychological picture that reinvigorated a tired franchise. “It’s awesome,” I told her. “Awesome. Just awesome.” She wondered, she later said, what kind of journalist had just one adjective in his vocabulary. Somehow, she married me all the same.

“Awesome” has been with my generation in America so long that it now has a whiff of retro. There is a Tumblr blog entitled “My Parents Were Awesome”, which features pictures, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s, of the writers’ parents looking young and cool. It generated a spin-off book that included nostalgic essays by some of the children. And “awesome” caught on not only with my age group, but with anyone young enough to be considered young or youngish when “awesome” became awesome. Barack Obama, a college student in Los Angeles when the “Official Preppy Handbook” came out, turned it into a joke on the campaign trail in 2008. When asked what was his biggest weakness, he would say: “It’s possible I’m a little too awesome.”

Britons have a love-hate relationship with linguistic innovations from America. In 2008 a Daily Telegraph correspondent, Toby Harnden, devoted a blog post to the “Top 10 Most Annoying Americanisms”, something that would scarcely occur to an American columnist to do with Britishisms. But he didn’t include “awesome”. And well he might not, because it now looms as large in Britain as it once did in America. It has even grabbed a chunk of market share from the great British word for “great”—“brilliant”. The Guardian, the paper that mocked “awesome” in 1982, had used it in 6,457 articles by July 2011, with one or two being added each day. It is no longer just God or jaw-dropping natural wonders: a catch by a cricketer, a mashed-potato dish and savings in a council budget have all gone down as “awesome”.

In June the Guardian asked writers to name worn-out phrases, and Sampurna Chattarji chose “awesome”, noting that it had made it to India (“with an American accent”), while scorning it as meaningless. She’s right, but words are shifting—together, as part of a system—all the time. “Terrible” begins to mean “bad”, so “awesome” must replace “terrible”. Then “awesome” becomes “excellent”, so “awe-inspiring” has to fill the space left behind. Then teenagers hear their parents saying “awesome”, and it becomes the last thing they want to say. So new words are roped in: “sick” meaning “great” is big in America, while in Britain “safe” shows signs of becoming the new “awesome”. If you have kids and want them to stop using either of these words, just adopt it yourself.

Robert Lane Greene is a business correspondent for The Economist, and author of "You Are What You Speak". Here he explains why it's okay to split an infinitive.

Picture credit: Lara604 (via Flickr)

IDEAS ROBERT LANE GREENE LANGUAGE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2011

In Time of Scrimping, Fun Stuff Is Still Selling

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD and ANDREW MARTIN

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With a flat job market and an economy that will not improve, Americans are once again buckling down and cutting back.

At least on the things that they can resist.

Consumers at all income levels have been splurging on indulgences while paring many humdrum household expenses, according to industry data for the last year. Many retailers also report that while fripperies like purses and perfumes are best sellers, they cannot get shoppers interested in basics like diapers, socks and vacuum bags.

“My birthday is coming up, so I’m treating myself,” said Ragan Belton, a social worker leaving the Macy’s in Manhattan with newly styled hair and a pair of shoes.

Consumer psychologists say that in this uncertain economy — coming after one of the worst recessions in generations — it is just too hard being good all the time.

“People have a limited supply of energy to put toward controlling their urges,” Kathleen D. Vohs, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota, said in an e-mail. Ms. Vohs studies spending behavior at the university’s Carlson School of Management.

Many of the products selling briskly are not high-priced, but they could be on a party supply list: premixed cocktails and coolers, cheesecake, cosmetics and wine. Meanwhile, sales of staples like batteries, bleach and fertilizer have declined sharply.

The pattern has shifted since the recession, when shoppers stocked up on basics but consumer spending and overall retail sales plummeted. Now, despite persistent consumer pessimism, spending is holding up, retailers have posted consistent profits and some companies that make the fun stuff are reporting especially strong results.

The cosmetics maker Estée Lauder, for example, announced last month that it had recorded its strongest fiscal year in North America in a decade, and a competitor, L’Oréal, said its first-half net profit was up 12 percent from a year ago. Last week, a crush of shoppers hoping to buy a cheaper line of Missoni fashions at Target brought down the retailer’s Web site for the better part of a day.

“When the crisis hit and people really started to feel a pinch in their pocketbooks, they started to spend less across the board, especially in discretionary kinds of things,” said Vicki G. Morwitz, a professor of marketing at the Stern School of Business at New York University. “But it’s difficult, I think, for people to do that for a long time, even when they need to.”

Economists say the spending does not translate into a broader shift in consumer confidence, nor does it point to an economic revival. In the long run, basics are the bread and butter of retailing, and when they slump, the industry as a whole eventually feels the pinch. Also, some analysts say, many shoppers remain price-conscious, even about their indulgences. That means they tend to gravitate toward cheaper imports, which might help on the retail employment front but does not create manufacturing jobs domestically.

“The toughest businesses, frankly, have been in the middle of the basics assortments,” Myron E. Ullman III, chairman and chief executive of J. C. Penney, told investors last month, referring to clothing staples. In the company’s second quarter, shoes, handbags and jewelry were top sellers.
At Kohl’s, similar categories — watches, handbags and women’s shoes — were among the strong sellers in the second quarter.

“The psychology of the customer is you can — I hate to sound too esoteric here — but you can improve your outfit or dress up your outfit without buying a new outfit by buying a new handbag,” said Kevin Mansell, chief executive of Kohl’s. “It makes people feel better.”

Unit sales of premade cocktails and coolers, which declined in the first two years of the recession, have jumped 24 percent in the last year. A similar pattern holds with many other indulgent items, which dropped in sales when the recession hit. In the last year, though, sales of body scrubbers jumped 21 percent, cosmetic accessories rose 22 percent and nail polish rose 10 percent. Refrigerated baked goods were up 16 percent, and wine 6 percent. The figures come from SymphonyIRI Group, a market research firm in Chicago, that tracked sales at most major stores, excluding Wal-Mart, for the 52 weeks ending July 10.

“In a poor economy, at any given moment people are more likely to have problems with self-control than otherwise — because there’s only so far their self-control energy can be stretched,” said Ms. Vohs, the professor of marketing.

Some of the products that declined are associated with household chores. Fertilizer and weed killer dropped 19 percent, as did vacuum bags. Thermometers declined by 20 percent, and flashlights and batteries by 10 percent. Diapers, bleach, shoe polish, car wax and socks are also on a downward trajectory, the data shows. Of course, not all products fit neatly into these trends. Experts are still pondering the run on meat pies, the sales of which jumped 15 percent.
People interviewed about their shopping practices sounded as if they had grown tired of budgeting. Ms. Belton, the shopper at Macy’s, said that she had curtailed spending as her hours and pay decreased, but that she needed a break from the austerity. “This was one of the first times shopping in six months,” she said.

Outside a Sephora store in Times Square, Angela Spencer, 50, said, “I may not buy as much, but I accessorize more.” She splurges, she said, “only if I really got to have it.”

One thriving category in the treat-yourself economy has been cheesecake, with sales rising 22 percent in the last year, according to the SymphonyIRI data.

At Junior’s Cheesecake, a Brooklyn-based restaurant and cheesecake store, a co-founder, Alan Rosen, said sales at the 61-year-old company were increasing again after dropping for the first time ever during the recession.

“People want to get back to living — it’s become a more adjusted normal,” he said.