Ditch that A word!

Some time back my daughter showed me a birthday video one of her friends had made for another of her friends. In these Corona times, a video is the loveliest and most practical birthday gift- there’s no need to wear a mask and gloves while taking or receiving it, no need to wipe it with sodium hypochlorite and no need to pay for it.

The video was a concoction of recorded snips of good-looking, pimpled teenagers wishing Happy Birthday, visuals of good times they had spent together and a lot of swirly dancing text. Just one word leapt out to me from that video and gripped my attention- AWESOME.

Everyone used AWESOME to describe everything- the facial features of the birthday girl, her physique, her personality, her dressing sense, her style, her singing voice, her talking voice, her current boyfriend- her relationship with him, her ex-boyfriend -her intelligence in dumping him, her last year birthday cake, her first party with the group, her latest party with the group………… All of it was just AWESOME!

These millennials have such a limited vocabulary- I thought to myself. McDonald’s Burger- AWESOME. The sunset in multiple shades of orange and grey- the lucent ball gently, unhurriedly burying itself behind the grey hills-AWESOME.

Very recently at a call, we non-millennials were discussing the outcome of a recently concluded meeting. We all expressed happiness that the meeting had been an AWESOME one. X’s presentation was just AWESOME. The questions and the discussion that followed were AWESOME. We never expected that we would come to such an AWESOME solution to the problem. And it was AWESOME that all affected parties were so AWESOME ly understanding about it.

Oh, God! Please save us from the tyranny of this ubiquitous adjective that has so deeply embedded itself into the DNA of our language that it oozes out into all our expressions just like sleep drool.

I often wonder if our vocabulary is the problem. But Google says that the average English native speaker knows about 20,000 words with university-educated people knowing around 40,000 words. When using, this goes down to about 5,000 very common words that are used repeatedly. Do we not have some descriptive words in those 5,000 which have some meaning? Or are we slothful? Or have the ready crutches of AWESOME led to an impoverished imagination? It seems too much of an exertion to dig into our linguistic memory to come by a word that appropriately describes something, that etches a picture in the brain, that strikes a chord in the heart!

I read somewhere that the word “AWESOME” is from the 1590s. The oldest meaning of AWESOME is “something which inspires awe”. It is ideally supposed to describe something ecstatic, something that is out of the ordinary, something that really inspires awe. Today, it’s the most abused and overused word in the English language!

Hello, I’ve come to meet my friends. They are upstairs. I say to the receptionist. AWESOME, she says without looking up from her screen. May I have your ID, please?

Hello I am the winner of today’s quiz and I’ve come for my prize- I say to the receptionist. AWESOME, she says without looking up from her screen. May I have your ID, please?

Hello, my father died yesterday, I need to discuss his funeral, I say to the receptionist. AWESOME, she says without looking up from her screen. May I have your ID, please?