In today’s world, nifty and swell just don’t cut it

One awesome word in the English language is so awesome that Americans today find it impossible to make it through an entire day, or even an entire sentence, without using it twice.

That word is “awesome.” We are so in love with its awesome power that it has usurped many of the words Americans formerly used to describe something awesome, such as “keen,” “nifty,” “swell” and, yes, even “crackerjack.”

How often do you hear people say, “Whoa. That’s crackerjack, dude”?

The proliferation of awesome has been building for decades, probably since the 1970s, but it reached a minor pinnacle last week, during a champagne-soaked baseball locker room interview.

Interviewer: How awesome does it feel to finally win the pennant after so many years of trying?

Baseball player: Oh man. It’s awesome!

There you have it. It felt so awesome it was awesome.

Although to be fair, the player didn’t have a lot of options in answering this question. I personally was rooting for him to say something like, “Highly awesome!” or “Way awesomer than average!”

Even highly paid professional writers cannot resist the sheer awesomeness of awesome. Stephen King crafts the following two sentences in the new book, “Faithful,” in describing Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling:

“He was awesome last night. The word is tired, clapped-out from overuse, but I’ve had a 170-mile drive to try and think of a better one, and I cannot.”

That’s because, as overused as it is, awesome is a perfectly good word. It has been around since at least 1598, which is the first usage listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

It probably was around long before that, when the first Anglo-Saxon took the word “awe” and stuck the suffix “some” on the end, just like lonesome and fearsome.

However, here’s a totally awesome bit of irony: For most of the preceding four centuries, awesome meant nearly the opposite of what most people use it for now.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists one of the major definitions as: “Inspiring awe; appalling, dreadful, weird,” which is not too far from “awful.”

That makes sense, because the original meaning of awe was “immediate and active fear; terror, dread,” which is what the Pentagon intended when it vowed to inflict “shock and awe” upon Baghdad.

So you can still find “awesome” used in its original way, as in, “the awesome power of the hydrogen bomb.”

Still, most people would be appalled (or even “awed”) if you tried to use the old definition of “awesome” in everyday conversation.

Person No. 1: I just got a call from my doctor. I have cancer.

Person No. 2: Oh, man. That’s awesome news.

Words have a way of shifting meaning, and, boy, did that ever happen with awesome. The word awesome was routinely used to refer to the power of God Almighty (it’s used 34 times in the New International Version of the Bible). That power can inspire dread, as in, the fear of God, but it also inspires reverence, which is an entirely different thing.

So awesome gradually began to mean something more positive, something that inspires reverence, amazement, admiration or, in the case of “Awesome, dude!” just good old general approval.

By 1992, noted linguists such as Wayne Campbell of “Wayne’s World” were using it as a general substitute for “Excellent!” Awesome also began to replace such garden variety terms as “Terrific!”, “Outstanding!” and, by a landslide, “Neat-o!”

It’s not hard to figure out why. If you want to pick a word that expresses approval in an extra-dramatic way, why not pick a word that once described the righteous wrath of God Almighty? Even if all you are saying is, “Dude, that’s the most awesome chalupa”?