A Gift

I was handed a folder with about two hundred pages in it, and when I opened it I saw hundreds of hours of work I had done over a period of about four years.  Each page was a little essay on the etymology of an ordinary English word.  I had written them and then taped-recorded them at the KDCR studio for broadcast on a little five minute spot I did called "What's the Good Word?"  About two years ago I stopped doing the show and now, here was the KDCR secretary, probably on a house cleaning kick, handing me the written transcripts of the show.  How thoughtful.


I had sort of forgotten them even though I have them somewhere on my hard drive.  Reading through them I had an idea:  Why not put one up on my blog every week--say on Tuesday? 
So here goes:

Awesome

            Recently I heard a speaker suggest that the word awesome, one of the most popular exclamations of our day, especially among young people, was not really a very good word to use to describe our God Jahweh.  Terrible, he suggested, would much better catch the meaning of the original language and the attribute of God that awe or awesome try to get at.  He is correct, I think, to this extent:  The use of awesome today has been so trivialized, so voided of its original meaning, by its contemporary application to anything from french fries to ball games to a loud sneeze.  The terror has departed from the word.  It is really just one more in a chain of words that teen culture has appropriated like keen, nifty, neat, cool, tough, boss, bad, and so on.  Now mind you, I’m not complaining.  The fact is that language is constantly changing and we could no more stop it than we could stop the earth from turning.  And the people who change it most often are the ordinary speakers of the language.

            But awe as it was originally used is probably a stronger word than terrible–or at least as strong.  The first meaning given in the OED is “Immediate and active fear; terror; dread.”  The second meaning given is “dread mingled with veneration; reverential or respectful fear.” Unfortunately I can’t read any of the really ancient written usages from Old English, because Old English would sound like a completely foreign language to us.  But in 1692, John Milton in Paradise Regained wrote: “To His great baptism flocked with awe the regions round.”

            Interestingly, Milton spells awe a-w-e--just the way we spell it.  But in a version of Psalm 89:30 from 1300, it is spelled in the Old English way a-g-h.  In that same text, law is spelled l-a-g-h.  Now this is interesting, I think.  Perhaps you have wondered why some words in English have such odd spellings.  Why is there a “g” in ought, caught, laugh, cough, etc.?   Well, the answer is that the guttural “g” sound of the 1300 hundreds, was changed to a “w” sound during the Middle English Period.  This was a change that occurred in many words; some kept the “g” spelling, others, like law and awe, dropped it.

            But no matter how you spelled it, awe was a fearsome state of mind until quite recently.  Today when we sing the chorus “Our God is an Awesome God,” I’m not sure what our young people are thinking: A cool God?  Nifty?  If so, we probably ought to quit singing it.  Perhaps only people over fifty, who remember what awe and awesome used to mean, should sing the song.  It is possible that a slang usage like awesome will diminish in influence and the old meaning will return.  More likely though, awesome will never again have the power it once had.  That’s just the way language works.  And remember, our God invented language.   Awesome.

            This is David Schelhaas saying, “What’s the Good Word.”