aurora borealis from space: "awesome"
Current usage of the word "awesome" on the Internet sounds a bit odd to my ears. This is a picture of an awesome phenomenon; a photo of someone's cat on Flickr, say, is NOT awesome, though it might be "quite good", "cute" or even "not bad", I would say. (But then, who am I to say what's right? Prescriptive grammar was buried with Fowler , unless you're a Daily Telegraph reader .) It's quite interesting, something you can actually follow happening linguistically. It's a bit like "bad" (meaning "good"), which came from AAVE . It was gradually replaced by the (initially) stronger "wicked", which has since come to mean little more than "nice" now. Heigh ho.