Dude, that’s awesome.

We can reclaim land from the ocean and water from the sewers.  We can reclaim wood and make beautiful new countertops.  But what about language?  Can we reclaim words?  My theory on this is, pessimistically, no.

Maybe you want to, just for the sake of argument, disagree with me.  Okay, good.  I happen to have a word I’m offering up for reclamation: awesome.  Seriously.  Let’s put it to the work it was intended for.

Here’s a little etymological history for you:  It goes way back to the Greek syllable(*agh-) for “pain,” “fright” and/or “grief.” From that we get our word “awe.”  Currently “awe” suggests “dread mixed with veneration,” mainly because that’s how the Bible describes our mortal reactions to God.  Now there’s something important to note here, which is that “awe” does not just mean “amazement”; to be filled with awe is to be humbled by a healthy dose of fear.  Awe transcends the ego.  “Awesome” entered the written word world in 1598, and a great example of it in its original linguistic context is this quotation by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.

Awesome is clearly right at home among such concepts as gloom, summoning, and spirits of the nether world.  That’s where awesome belongs.  But I am as guilty as you of awesome-abuse.  It’s one of those convenient enthusiastic responses: “Dude, that’s awesome.”  A quick Google search suggests that the following things, in someone’s estimation, are in fact awesome:

• socialism
• topless robots
• time travel
• teaching English in Japan
• Tony Danza
• abstinence
• Jessica Alba’s pregnancy
• freelancing
• being black

With exception of perhaps time travel*, and oh, okay, Tony Danza**, can we fairly ascribe a sense of “dread and veneration” to any of the things on the list?  Maybe we should blame Jeff Spicoli, but chances are most of the things you or I attribute awesome-ness to are in fact just kind of cool, like my vegetable peeler in the shape of a tropical bird, or the fact that I can easily renew my Vancouver Public Library books online.

George Orwell says, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” and I must agree.  “Awesome” used to describe God, but now, according to Merriam Webster, it’s a synonym for “terrific.”  Terrific?  Come on, can you think of a lame-er positive adjective?  Awesome deserves better than that.

Let’s do it together.  Next time you traverse the Sahara, or encounter an anaconda, or find yourself on a rock climb that challenges all previously-held assumptions about your mental and physical capability, you’re going to need a word for it.  So then, and only then, say it like you mean it: Dude, it was awesome.

*Have you not been watching Lost?

** That one’s for you, Kerry.

Excuse me while I go pandiculate.

I love dictionaries.  Not thesauruses–not to offend any first year university students who might be reading this post; I know your people are prone to celebrating the thesaurus.   And admittedly, the thesaurus has its place, but my heart belongs to the dictionary.  Particularly, I love the convenience of an online dictionary, complete with etymology and hyperlinking synonyms and antonyms.  And I like a book (or website as the case may be) that breaks a word into its component parts, suddenly making its place in our lexicon not only logical but also obvious.  I love those parts of words, roots (like nym) and affixes (like syn and ant).  The affix is actually an amazing category of word parts which includes the familiar prefix and suffix as well as the more exotic suprafix, interfix and duplifix.  In fact, there are a whole host of fix-es–look them up, I promise you’ll love them.  Love them.  Really.  Go ahead, we’ll pause for a minute.  Here’s a link.

By the way, don’t you love that the root of affix is fix, which means “to make stable”?  Don’t you love that the syllable pre anchors down the fix so that it its meaning is then fixed as a word that is demonstrative of its own meaning?  Isn’t it kind of blowing your mind right now?

See there, you just got a glimpse of what it’s like to be in my class where we occasionally pause to put a bunch of different roots and fixes and etymological family trees on the marker board then sit back and oooh and aaah, before going on with whatever it is that we were talking about in the first place.  The text, context, subtext lecture, for example, is a real riot-starter.

But I digress.  The point of this blog entry–which was meant to be short seeing as it’s about words and I have no images to break up what is shaping up to be a longish block of text–is to be a kind of thank you note to the kind folks at dictionary.com’s “Word of the Day” e-mail.  I’ve been a loyal subscriber to the dictionary.com Word of the Day for about five or six or eight years now.  And I can tick off my all-time favorite word-of-the-day words as if I were naming my predictions for People Magazine’s sexiest men of 2009: quixotic, crepuscular, antediluvian, zeugma, lubricious, xanthous.  Because, not to out myself as a logophile, but some words are totally sexier than Hugh Jackman.  But Hugh Jackman reading these words to me?  Well, he’s not really the type of celebahunk (how’s that for an interfix?) I go for but, with the right vocabulary, I suppose I could be distracted.

Anyway, something happened with the turn of the calendar.  Perhaps the writers of the Word of the Day were trying to lure in those folks whose New Year’s resolution was to “improve my vocabulary” by making them feel as if they were already quite well versed in the nuances of the English language.  Or perhaps the Word of the Day went multi-lingual in 2009 and the writers embarked on a misguided attempt to start the non-English speakers off with some manageable selections.  Maybe the staff had a bring-your-third grader to work week and let the kids select the vocab.  Or maybe after all these years they just got bored and went on a two-week bender, converting the dictionary into a giant dart board and turning the Word of the Day selection process into a free-for-all drinking game.  Whatever the case may be, it resulted in a selection of Words of the Day that were about ten times more commonplace than your average PSAT vocabulary term: eclectic, obscure, abstinent, zealous, gargantuan, ramble.  Sure, maybe some folks down’t know the exact definition of zealous.  But come-on, after the previous administration, you can bet anyone approaching puberty knows well the definition of abstinent. And ramble?  Really?  Ramble??

Finally things turned around last week with a real beauty of a word: pandiculation.  And for your reading pleasure, I’ll paste its definition for you here:

pandiculation \pan-dik-yuh-LEY-shuhn\, noun:

an instinctive stretching, as on awakening or while yawning

by 1611 from French pandiculation from Latin pandiculari “to stretch oneself” and French suffix -ion.

It’s just enough to make you go all gooey inside isn’t it? (If not, imagine Hugh Jackman stretched out leisurely of your futon, wrapping his Aussie accent around those syllables.  Tell me words aren’t sexy.)