Epawesome
By Capt. Fogg
In today's American parlance, or kidspeak as I call it, everything worth mentioning is either awesome or it sucks. As with some aspects of American politics there's not much in between the extremes of cliche description, although of late some things have become less awesome and more epic. Perhaps the kids are growing tired of awesome as they grow older, some of our kids being in late middle age these days.
Anyway, I have the bad habit of noticing trends and processes in things and I noticed a sign just the other day, advertising a church down here in the Bible belt -- a church where they provide "Epic Worship."
It's not that epic is a bad or lesser word for what goes on in churches. The Bible after all is truly an epic: an historical and poetical narrative or tradition. For those who worship the Bible or the characters in it, the experience might indeed be awesome in the true sense of the word if I might be permitted to suggest that words have true meaning or history.
Perhaps awesome has lost a bit of its panache, having effectively replaced a large portion of the vocabulary although, like the other cute, cliche manifestations of eternal youth and hipness we cling to, perhaps not. Such things have an extraordinary life span, after all. Backwards hats are entering the second half century of cutting edge semiotic splendor seen at the country club as well as the convenience store dumpster late at night. Who knows how much longer things will be awesome or how much longer we'll be content with saying it as though we were Oscar Wilde uttering some fresh, novel and awesomely trenchant witticism. I suspect one of those syncritisms we see when we study ancient pantheons or senescent dialects: Amun and Ra become Amun-Ra and gigantic and enormous fuse together to make the user feel ginormously less illiterate.
In short, how much longer before we hear epawsome?
In today's American parlance, or kidspeak as I call it, everything worth mentioning is either awesome or it sucks. As with some aspects of American politics there's not much in between the extremes of cliche description, although of late some things have become less awesome and more epic. Perhaps the kids are growing tired of awesome as they grow older, some of our kids being in late middle age these days.
Anyway, I have the bad habit of noticing trends and processes in things and I noticed a sign just the other day, advertising a church down here in the Bible belt -- a church where they provide "Epic Worship."
It's not that epic is a bad or lesser word for what goes on in churches. The Bible after all is truly an epic: an historical and poetical narrative or tradition. For those who worship the Bible or the characters in it, the experience might indeed be awesome in the true sense of the word if I might be permitted to suggest that words have true meaning or history.
Perhaps awesome has lost a bit of its panache, having effectively replaced a large portion of the vocabulary although, like the other cute, cliche manifestations of eternal youth and hipness we cling to, perhaps not. Such things have an extraordinary life span, after all. Backwards hats are entering the second half century of cutting edge semiotic splendor seen at the country club as well as the convenience store dumpster late at night. Who knows how much longer things will be awesome or how much longer we'll be content with saying it as though we were Oscar Wilde uttering some fresh, novel and awesomely trenchant witticism. I suspect one of those syncritisms we see when we study ancient pantheons or senescent dialects: Amun and Ra become Amun-Ra and gigantic and enormous fuse together to make the user feel ginormously less illiterate.
In short, how much longer before we hear epawsome?
posted by Libby Spencer at 10:40 AM
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