AWFUL

Two words that traded places. One was magnificent and became terrible. The other was terrifying and became wonderful. Language has no memory of which was which, and neither, now, do we.

AWFUL descends from awe and once meant full of awe-inspiring quality: the awful power of God, the awful silence before a storm, the awful majesty of a mountain at dusk. For centuries, awful was a word for things that made you stop, catch your breath, feel small in a way that was not unpleasant. Then the word flipped. The awe-inspiring became the merely terrible. The sublime became the shoddy.

TERRIFIC descended from Latin terrificus — causing terror, inspiring dread. A terrific storm was one that might kill you. A terrific opponent was one before whom you fled. Then it too flipped — in the opposite direction. The terrible became the wonderful. The dread became the delight. By the twentieth century, terrific had completed its inversion: “You look terrific” now means something a grandmother says approvingly.

These two words are mirror images of semantic drift, and they are worth studying together because they demonstrate that language does not decay in a single direction. It is not that words only weaken (pejoration) or only strengthen (amelioration). The drift can go either way, and can go from the same starting point to opposite destinations.

What remains of the original meanings is only residue: “the awful weight of responsibility” still carries a ghost of sublimity, “a truly terrific storm” still permits the older dread. The words have not entirely forgotten. They are merely no longer sure which direction home is.