Carpe Awesome Diem
What’s happening to language?
It’s changing, of course.
We had breakfast a couple of days ago in one of our fine local restaurants.
The young waitress asked us what we’d like to drink, and when I said “water,” she said “awesome!”
It’s interesting how such reflexive overuse of words eventually empties them of meaning. Try saying “soul” a hundred times quickly and you can instantly experience that collapse of meaning.
Words are used for a complex of motives, including (1) to convey meaning, and (2) to announce our tribal membership in a Granfalloon.
The trouble is, even when the meaning runs its course, as it’s now done with “awesome,” the word continues to get used by the Granfalloon wannabes … and we’re all GF wannabes to some extent.
The word “awesome” is now the linguistic equivalent of a cold soufflé.
When everything is “awesome,” nothing is.
What word will we use next to convey our sense of awe and wonder and excitement?
3 thoughts on “Carpe Awesome Diem”
One could argue that the Tea Party is a granfalloon.
(thank you for that word, btw)
We can thank Kurt Vonnegut! 🙂 I first heard about granfalloons in one of his novels years ago, and I’ve noticed over the years that the concept keeps coming up.
I agree about the Tea Party.
But it’s also fun to discover what granfalloons you belong to!
Vonnegut applied it to Hoosiers.
When I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I had to write a paper for a Sociology class examining my “living group.”
I was living by myself in a rooming house at the time — this was in the sixties — so I wrote a thinly-disguised tongue-in-cheek “sociological analysis” of people living in rooming houses. I made it all up, then went back and added a bunch of hyphens, because it seemed to me that sociology was the most hyphenated of all disciplines (peer-group-pressure, age-cohort, etc.).
That was the only time in my life I ever got depressed about getting an “A.” Looking back, I believe I didn’t take any of it seriously because (1) it was the sixties, and (2) I really believed that the class of “people-who-lived-in-rooming-houses” was a Granfalloon (before I’d ever heard the word …so I just had a vague sense of it).
I’m ashamed now of the arrogant sense of entitlement I had as a middle-class teen-aged college student whose parents were paying all the bills!
Any way you look at it, it was awesome.
I’m as guilty of overusing the word “awesome” as anybody.. In fact, now I have to use the phrase “actually awesome” to mean “awesome.” But hey, at least I don’t abbreviate the words “you” or “are” … 🙂