ABSTRACT
When the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles described good things as awesome, they were helping along a process that has been going on as long as language has existed: they were helping a word change its meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the earliest meanings of awesome as 'inspiring awe' and 'dreadful'. That is, the earliest meanings of awesome referred to things which made you feel awe because of how terrible or weird they were. Today, awesome has become a word descriptive of just the opposite state of affairs: things that are awesome are wonderful, superb, terrific, neat. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, this meaning is first found in the 1980s. Words which describe things as being very good or very bad are often words which change their meanings rapidly, because overuse of a particular word makes it feel weak and a new hyperbole is required.
