Evolution of the meaning of words

Robert Lane Green thinks that words like awesome and terrible are used so often and are overrated because the meaning of those words have changed completely over time.

When I read this article I was awestruck or let's say I felt "awesome." Green tells us about how words evolved so much over time that it now has a completely different meaning to it. The words that were then used to define God and his powers are now used to define random people and things by people who have absolutely no idea of what the meanings of those words are.

I do not know how the trend of using those words started, however, in my life it started after I met my friend's annoying brother who called himself awesome all day long. To be honest, he was pretty cool so yeah I kind of tried to imitate his coolness and maybe just maybe that might be how I started considering myself as "awesome." This has not only happened to me. A lot of my friends also tend to pick up those word trends from someone they look up too, and as Green mentions in his article, that someone is mostly their parents. Parents have a huge role to pass on characteristics, especially a way of using words, further on to us. Green writes in his article that we must be the ones to "adopt" ourselves in order to stop the future generations (our to be children) as we are the ones they will look up to.

Who knew that a word like terrible was used to describe God at one point of time. If I called someone a terrible person in junior school (hopefully not in high school,) I just might get myself into a huge trouble with the teacher. Imagine calling God terrible at this time in midst of a group of strictly religious people, they would probably execute me. Another meaning of word that I had picked up while watching television was "sick" and "dope," and I unconsciously started using those words while talking to my bewildered mother. I would tell her that the new mall she took me to is sick and she would innocently tell me that she honestly thought that I would have liked it. After explaining her that the meaning of sick is great or amazing, she told me that our generation has come up with all the words to confuse the people of her generation. After reading this article I finally cracked the meaning of the word "safe" to the people from Britain and now I might of unconsciously encoded it in my mind as well. A few years back there was a big trend among my friends from the United Kingdom to say "stay safe" after every conversation that we had and till the time I read this article, I thought that the wanted me to actually "stay safe." Not knowing that "safe" is the new awesome, I would tell them that I could take care of myself and they would just laugh when I said that. Now, I just find myself stupid.

What Green, wrote in his article about words taking a new form of meaning is totally true. It is funny how people twist and turn the meaning of words and give it a whole new meaning. Terms like that is "retard" has started becoming cool. I don't know how that is anywhere close to cool, but yeah it just is. I think that evolutionary is not doing justice to words.