Awesome has long meant “awe inspiring,” or “awe expressing,” but in the eighties it was suddenly taken up as a hyperbolic adjective to describe anything better than average: My roommates thought my new car was really awesome. The student world often pioneers such uses and then drops them and moves on to the next vogue word for the next brief season, leaving its elders (who should know better) to carry on with the old vogue words for up to a decade or two longer. Consider the recent and similar histories of super, gross, outstanding, wicked, and many others. Similarly hyperbolic is the use of awesome and awesomely as intensifiers, now running wild: He had an awesome great motorcycle. She gets awesomely high grades. Awesome and awesomely will no doubt one day be perfectly useful words again, but just now they are shopworn and weary. Compare AWFUL; SLANG.
