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Thursday, October 21, 2010
Etymology Ponderings: Awesome and Awful
Have you ever noticed how the words awesome and awful have the same exact root? Yet they mean completely opposite things. Let's analyze...
The root of both words is awe, a word derived from Old English that means “a feeling of fear or amazement”. That in its own right is contradictory, since we perceive fear as a negative emotion, and amazement as a positive emotion. I will use a word that equally describes both: shock.
The suffix is easy: -ful means full, and -some means some. Hence, awful means “fully shocking”, and awesome means “somewhat shocking”.
The philosophy behind awesome and awful is that awe (or in my theory, any emotion) is meaningless without quantity. A little of it is good, and lot of it is bad.
3 comments:
Have you ever noticed how few truly distinct roots (aka stems) there are across languages, across languages of different groups? There are so few words, and human mind is so unimaginative that people of disparate cultures end up calling the same thing by the same concept.
That said, my favorite word is still "defenestrate".
I have! Though I don't think it's because the human mind is unimaginative. I think it's because languages have always evolved through migration, and through the need to communicate with distant civilizations. For example, ancient Greece derived its alphabet from the Mesopotamian (Arameic and Hebrew), though they changed many of the written symbols. Rome and Russia modified it slightly and called it their own. Most languages in the world now use some form of what used to be the Mesopotamian alphabet.
Aso for defenestrate, I'm putting that on my list of clean words that sound dirty. :)
Just add the entire French language wholesale.
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