Awesome trivialities

I first came across the word ‘awesome’ when analyzing a poem in my 6^th grade English class. I was instantly drawn to the word as I found the sound of it pleasant and peculiar. Today, I feel that it belongs in the mouths of teenagers more than in old English poetry. In any given conversation, it seems to be slipped into every other sentence.

“Dude, that party was awesome!”, “Your hair looks awesome”, “This hamburger is awesome!”
I dare say that although a hamburger might be good, satisfying, tasty or delicious, it has to be a somewhat extraordinary burger to truly fit the label it is given when we call it ‘awesome’. One definition of awesome is this: extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great admiration, apprehension, or fear. This is hardly what we are trying to express when we use the word in everyday conversation. The overuse of words in itself is something that easily gets on my nerves but in the case of ‘awesome’ I feel that something has been lost with the change in meaning and use for this particular word. For what do we do when something truly is awesome, that is to say when it leaves our jaw hanging open and overthrows us completely; when it leaves us in awe? Of course we can use synonyms to properly explain ourselves, but if this is the direction in which our language is going and we keep discharging words of their meaning by overusing and trivializing them, is our range of possibility to truly express ourselves decreasing?

Seeing the word in poetry now, it stands out to me as being strangely misplaced. In this way, the meaning it has come to have in my everyday life has effectively overruled the original meaning of the word. While I know this is natural, and that it happens to many words it is slightly depressing to know that my opportunities to truly express how I feel has been narrowed down, even if only by a microscopic bit. Although the word is still perfectly valid when used in its original meaning, a sentence like ‘It was an awesome cathedral’ has a strangely casual ring to it, and I am afraid I will never quite be able to appreciate the word in its original meaning again. This bothers me quite a bit and it is definitely not awesome.

First posts, years and impressions.

MUWCI is often referred to as a bubble, a description I find quite precise. When I am here, it is easy to forget that the outside world exists. In a way, the bubble we lived in through all of last year has already burst. There is no way you can take away half of the people who made out a community and still expect things to be exactly the same. In my opinion, this is a good thing. Change allows us to take a step back and evaluate the things we encounter. Our batch has been given the opportunity to readjust our way of thinking rather than simply continuing to act in the same way because that is ‘how it has always been’. Saying that the things we do are right just because we have been doing them for a long time is a passive and unconstructive argument. However, it is much simpler to think like this than to actually evaluate and change our behavior. Coming to MUWCI, my second years’ way of thinking and behaving heavily influenced mine. I think this is quite natural. It took me a while to adjust to being in India, and adapting someone else’s approach to things was far easier than completely building up my own from the beginning. I am not saying that I blindly accepted whatever my second years presented me to. However, having been here for a year did give them some kind of authority or at least knowledge about the place that I did not yet have. Thinking about it now, I realize exactly how much the attitude of the people around us changes our view on things. If each of us attempts to approach the people and situations around us with an open mind this will inevitably affect the general feel of the community. Also, I am wondering how this place will change along with the people in it. If it is true that we are really just an ensemble of relationships, to how great an extent are we ourselves bound to change when more than a hundred new people are introduced to our lives? And how prominent is a first encounter really? I have no memory of when and where I first met most of the people that I now consider my closest friends. I would like to think that a part of me is consistent no matter who I am around. However, over summer I found it hard to combine the person I used to be at home and who I felt I had become during the year I had spent in MUWCI. Maybe it is not true that the people around us completely make us who we are, but rather that every relationship we have leave some kind of impression that will inevitably shape our personality.