I’ve been very tired of the use of the word "awesome" as conversational punctuation for some time now, but today I went over the edge.
I phoned my financial management firm to discuss and decide on a transaction, and the young doofus at the other end of the line ended our conversation with "Awesome, Jon. We’ll get back to you tomorrow."
Time to manage things myself (or more than I already do) …
Gaaack !
Powered by Qumana
I couldn’t agree more. I’m a school teacher and I have a list of these troublesome words–words like awesome, got, totally, radical, like used in any way other than to make comparisons and so on. If I catch any student using them they have to do five push ups. The word awesome, I tell them, can only be used to describe mountains and God.
Brad, thanks for stopping by. I understand your perspective. I can get sad at the general paucity of language skills in our North American society, but it must also be remembered that languages “live”. Clearly the world of tweeting, texting and blogging is having impacts none of us can control. But that begs the issue of having a good grounding in effective grammar and syntax before setting off to “experiment” or take license.
An additional note .. I am not big on punishment / discipline for issues of this sort, and so I doubt I would enjoy being your student. I fail to see how punishment and discipline support or enhance learning. I think doing pushups would increase my resentment and diminish my desire to learn in collaboration with you. But that’s just one man’s opinion, and so I hope you won’t take offense at me sharing my opinion.
Don’t you think there’s also a culture issue behind that. North American people always focus on what’s positive. They often say things in a very positive and attractive things.
On the contrary, some cultures focus on what’s wrong first. France we often begin our sentences by “no” even if at the end we mean “yes” and we rarely say “great ! awesome !” just because our interlocutor would be surprised (an often would not understand) such cheerful words.
Yes, Bertrand, as a generality I think there’s something to that, and it may come from France’s educational process, I think.