Dialect Blog

Regarding the subject of my last post, I was struck this passage from Alice Munro’s story, To Reach Japan:

They opened the compartment curtain to get more air, now that there was no danger of the child’s falling out.”Awesome to have a child,” Greg said. That was another word new at the time, or at least new to Greta.

I don’t believe Munro means that “Greta” has never heard “awesome” before, but rather that the trend toward this particular use of “awesome” was a recent development. The story takes place in the early 1960s (I think; Munro loves chronological ambiguity), and I must admit my surprise that someone would use “awesome” in the “cool/neat/groovy” sense that early*. Yet the Online Etymology Dictionary backs up Munro’s passage:

awesome (adj.) 1590s, “profoundly reverential,” from awe (n.) + -some (1). Meaning “inspiring awe” is from 1670s; weakened colloquial sense of “impressive, very good” is recorded by 1961 and was in vogue from after c.1980. Related: Awesomely; awesomeness.

“Awesome” has remained related to “greatness” in North American English, but developed an explicitly positive connotation within the past fifty years or so. As this Google NGram chart suggests, the popularity of this sense perhaps led to the word itself increasing in frequency during the post-war era:

So why did I not expect the word to appear in such a way in a story set fifty years ago? Probably because I associate “awesome” with the Reagan years, part of a broader semantic shift common at the time whereby words suggesting “extremity” of various kinds came to adopt positive meanings, as was also the case with  radical.

When you think about it, “awesome” is a rather unlikely everyday word, though, since it was once relatively obscure (Google NGram suggests the word “incorrigible” was significantly more common in the 1940s). It strikes me as a cousin to words like “excellent” and “brilliant,” but those words have always been far more commonplace:

Of course, “awesome” seems to have undergone a further shift since the 1980’s, in that it now joins “nice,” “cool,” and other words which indicate “halfhearted assent.” In other words, repeated use has rendered “awesome” an appropriate response to “I bought a new carton of milk at the grocery.” An odd fate for a word which once connoted fearsome power.

*Of course, one could read Greg’s comment as meaning “it’s a great responsibility to have a child,” but the character is supposed to be a young, artsy drifter, so that seems unlikely.

“‘Nauseous‘ doesn’t refer to being sick,” my 9th-grade English teacher told his class. “It refers to something that makes you sick.”

He sounded more apologetic than commanding; he didn’t seem to believe this “rule” any more than we did. Yet here we are in 2013, and the “nauseous/nauseated” beef remains. Type “common grammar mistakes” into Google, and the first result (a list titled “20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes“) contains this nugget:

Contrary to almost ubiquitous misuse, to be “nauseous” doesn’t mean you’ve been sickened: it actually means you possess the ability to produce nausea in others. e.g., That week-old hot dog is nauseous. When you find yourself disgusted or made ill by a nauseating agent, you are actually “nauseated.” e.g., … Stop embarrassing yourself.

Criticizing grammar absolutists is like shooting sleeping fish in a styrofoam barrel, yet I’m disturbed that anyone gives this dated rule credence. In The Accidents of Style: Good Advice on How Not to Write Badly, author Charles Harrington Elster expresses a depressingly common attitude–“this rule is silly, but let’s follow it so not to upset anyone:”

This usage is so common today that it can no longer be called an outright error. But it is still a general misunderstanding–a “peccadillo,” as “Garner’s Modern American Usage” puts it–disapproved of by most modern authorities.

These aren’t “fringe” opinions. Bill Bryson gets into the act. And I have to confess that I have more than once eschewed “nauseous” for “nauseated” when writing. Most people can agree that this rule doesn’t much reflect actual usage, yet many of us are a skittish about letting it go.

I view Standard English as a dialect (or dialects, really), and as such, it evolves. American Standard English, in my opinion, has shifted over the past century so that “nauseous” refers to the state of being sick to one’s stomach rather that its cause. I can’t imagine there’s much debate about this, unless you think that “Standard English” has no relationship to spoken language.

It doesn’t require in-depth experiments with giant corpora to come to these conclusions. A mere search through the past three years of the New York Times produces 49 usages of “nauseous.*” Only 10% of the these (by my count) use the conservative meaning. It’s not just informal quotations, either. “Nauseous,” meaning “sick to one’s stomach,” appears in journalistic contexts as well. Here is a book review by Janet Maslin:

Ms. Brown deals seriously and convincingly with the illness, but she also uses it as a handy plot hook. So the pregnant Cordy is as nauseous as her ailing mother.

Here is Alexander Kumar in the Times’ science blog:

I will never forget that day — waking up unusually short of breath, later feeling nauseous and struggling for oxygen in between bites of lunch.

And for good measure, here’s a disinterested article about the Los Angeles bus system:

They hold their coffee cup several inches away from their seats — the start-stop of the bus means the coffee could spill at any moment. They do not read because the lurching bus too easily makes them nauseous.

As I said, some Times writers still use “nauseous” in the older sense. But it’s clear that at least some of the papers’ proofreading staff (hardly grammatical anarchists) accept “nauseous” in the way most Americans understand it. And why not? If we don’t accept the evolution of Standard English, we cause confusion, not clarity. If we actively try to preserve century-old definitions, how can we communicate to the readers of today?

*If you do try this yourself, you’ll notice that NYTimes.com’s search will say it yields “300+” examples. I’m not sure why this is, since you only view 49. I can’t tell if the list is entirely complete or not, but even if it’s a sample, it’s a useful one.