Etymology of the word Awesome

Welcome back to the second article written by Leon is Awesome.  Today we are going to discuss the Etymology of the word awesome.  For those who don’t know Wikipedia defines Etymology as Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.  You might ask yourself why is it important to understand the history of a word and I agree… before we move into the history of the word we should discuss why we are even talking about this in the first place.

There is a famous quote that says those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.  It is really funny because growing up in high school I hated history.  I found it to be the most boring of any of the topics that we were taught.  Now that I am grown up (I shudder just typing that) I actually find it fascinating.  In life knowledge is power and to understand our current state we have to understand how and why we got here.  I wish I had time to actually study more of it but I have bigger fish to fry in my life right now.

Back to the word awesome and why Leon Is Awesome (actually that’s another article I wrote but we will save that for another time).  I think one of the first things we should do is actually define what the word awesome means.   Very simply put awesome is a synonym for amazing.  In linguistics there is a concept of what is called “normalizations.”  If I asked you to describe something you found amazing you could say amazing, you could so say, dope, sick, bad, rad, mad, gangsta, awesome, etc.  These are just ways people normalize the data to understand it.

I prefer the word awesome that is why when I always store myself in girl’s phones I store it as Leon Is Awesome.  This is simply my normalization of the word amazing.  I guess I could probably just store my name in her phone with Leon is Amazing but I prefer Leon Is Awesome.  Now that we all that covered let’s move on to etymology of the word awesome.

The word awesome is comprised of two other words: awe & some.  Before we move forward let’s have a look at those two words and what they mean.  Awe is “A feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder: “they gazed in awe at the small mountain of diamonds”.  The word some has many different definitions depending on what type of speech it is used as.  For example as an adverb “To some extent; somewhat: “the rules change some”. As a adjective “An unspecified amount or number of: “I made some money”. Finally as a pronoun “An unspecified number or amount of people or things: “if you want whiskey I’ll give you some”.

Now that we have our definitions let’s talk about where the words actually came from.  Awe is a word that came into being around 1250.  It is actually borrowed from a language that no longer exists that use to closely resemble Scandinavian.  This language is no longer in existence or I would thank them for providing the root for what would later become awesome and then be hijacked by me into Leon Is Awesome.  I have always found it fascinating how language can “die” out.  So many languages have.

Another thought on where the word Awe comes from is that it comes from around 1598 in England.  At that time the word Awe meant a feeling of reverence or amazement.  It was also used as a synonym for fear.  At some point (no pun intended we someone, again no unintended) combined both and awesome was born.  Later setting the stage for Leon Is Awesome to be born but that again is another story we are not dealing with here.

So now that we have the history of the word how do we use it.  I use it all the time as normalization for anything I like.  I also use it in my belief system (thus Leon Is Awesome). I use to use it growing up when it was style then one day it fell out of style.  It is weird how when we are kids words come in and out vogue.  This happens as adults too but as children we are much more susceptible to this.  I think this is because as kids we aren’t fully grounded in our beliefs so our frames are very ply able.  More about this in another article

That actually reminds me of a story that happened to me while I was travelling through Windsor Canada (very fun place if you like drinking and watching people be messes).  I was in the process of exchanging phone numbers with this young lady and I said tell me something awesome about you that I don’t already know.  She goes what does awesome mean?  I couldn’t believe she didn’t know what it meant but it turned out that she was a foreigner and that since awesome is a form of slang most foreigners might not know what it means.  I explained to her what it meant and then I stored my number in her phone as Leon Is Awesome.  She laughed and then we went home together and read the bible.

So we are getting close to the end of the article and I hope you enjoyed it.  I actually like writing though I feel I go on tangents a lot and I feel that I am forced to constantly mention that Leon Is awesome.  Actually I don’t constantly mention but I mention it a lot.  Not because I am conceited or anything of the such I just spent so much time working on my life so to be at a point where I truly believe I am awesome is special.  Thanks for reading, hope you got something out of it and till next time!