Awesome (or Not)

AWESOME: adj. "arousing an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred or sublime"

Awesome derives from Norse. Around 1300, we find aue, meaning “fear, terror, great reverence.” Aue comes from an Old Norse word meaning “fright”: agi. Add the Old English adjective-forming element some (“tending to; causing; to a considerable degree”), and you get awesome, which meant “profoundly reverential” in the 1590s and “inspiring awe or dread” by the 1670s.

Reverential Fear

The translators of the King James Bible chose the word awe, a derivative of aue, three times, each instance occurring in a psalm. Perhaps Psalm 33:8 best captures the long-standing force of this powerful noun. “Let all the earth fear the Lord: let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.” Since that publication in 1611, the translators of nearly every major English Bible have chosen awe as the fittest word for “the fear of the Lord,” which is indeed the meaning of the Hebrew word yirah, so translated. Over time, this fear became identified with reverence.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) offers “immediate and active fear; terror, dread” as the earliest English definition of awe. It then explains that the definition passed gradually into “dread mingled with veneration, reverential or respectful fear; the attitude of a mind subdued to profound reverence in the presence of supreme authority.” We can still see elements of that understanding in the OED’s third definition: “The feeling of solemn and reverential wonder, tinged with latent fear, inspired by what is terribly sublime and majestic in nature, e.g. thunder, a storm at sea.” In dictionaries published as late as the latter part of the 1900s, awe retained this definition: “an emotion variously combining dread, veneration, and wonder that is inspired by authority or by the sacred sublime” (Merriam-Webster online dictionary).

Linguistic Degeneration

Today, however, we hear “awesome” used to describe anything from a timely grand slam to the latest Marvel Universe movie to a new flavor of ice cream. The casual usage of this adjective was first recorded in 1961 but gained traction in the 1980s and has flourished ever since. This raises a question: how did such a somber and severe word come to mean “extremely good”?

Linguistic weakening such as this arises in part from hyperbole. Americans tend to exaggerate in their daily speech. A person claims to be “freezing” when he is only cold, or “starving” when he is only hungry. Such hyperbole is meant to emphasize the state described. However, describing something that is merely ordinary as “awesome” not only demonstrates a weakening of the word’s original force but also reflects the erosion of regard for God. In short, it is a symptom of our culture’s fading realization of who and what God is—something that was widely understood less than a century ago, even by those who had rejected him and who might have rightly used the term to describe a Gothic cathedral, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The informal usage demonstrates something more than mere linguistic weakening. It demonstrates a cultural change that leaves not only the language but every speaker who uses the word in this manner impoverished. Neither a contemporary Christian band nor Taylor Swift is likely to inspire the “dread, veneration, and wonder” spoken by previous generations of theologians, poets, hymnists, preachers, and ordinary, God-fearing men and women.

So take care when using the word awesome to limit its use to those things which inspire the wonder specific to God. In this way, we can better hold to the fear of God of which David, Solomon, and the prophets wrote in Scripture.