The basic long-term meanings of these words have been and continue to be “awe inspiring, full of things to cause awe and fear” and, by extension, “terrible and wonderful.” But today it takes careful contextual control to make awful exceed the horrors of a hangnail. At the Conversational level and even in some of the higher levels of written English we encounter awful almost everywhere, meaning (as an adjective) anything from “slightly below average or mildly unpleasant” to “terrible, monstrous, and horrible.” Traffic was awful, and we were almost half an hour late. It was an awful hurricane; hundreds were killed. Any cold short of pneumonia can be described as awful bad, illustrating the Nonstandard intensifier, just as for somewhat more consciously Standard-speaking Americans, that chest cold may instead be awfully bad. Like real and really, awful and awfully are (and have for a good while been) much overused in these hyperbolic ways, particularly in speech.
